Week4: The Benevolent Dictator - Lee Joowon

 This article analyzes Wikipedia's form of leadership: benevolent dictator. While Wikipedia is open and values consensus, its founder, Jimmy Wales, is called a benevolent dictator and has a strong autocratic power. This is "authorial leadership" which is based on the contribution and trust of leaders in the community and serves as the last bastion in times of emergency or conflict.

In addition, this article demonstrates the contrasting leadership differences between cofounders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. Unlike Sanger, who left because of conflict while trying to establish explicit rules and editorial powers, Wales compared himself to a "constitutional monarch" and usually chose to respect the autonomy of the community and intervene at critical moments. Accordingly, Wikipedia's governance has come to have a mixture of meritocratic, anarchic, and democratic, which could pose a risk of a fork, where projects could be separated if leaders abuse their power. 

I thought Wikipedia would have a horizontal structure because it was open and editable by anyone, but it was interesting that in reality, there was a leadership system like a benevolent dictator. It was particularly impressive that the role of administrators was not to control other members like other platforms, but to defend the system from emergencies from opposition forces.

In this article, Creating a fork was presented as a device to prevent leaders from abusing their power, and I wonder if it is a realistic means for users to check leaders and create a new wiki in an environment where the scale and effectiveness of the current data has grown.