anarchism in large public wikis

Although not all large public wikis are anarchist projects, some have pointed out that they generally have many anarchist qualities: wiki contributors co-operate freely for their own benefit as well as the benefit of all (mutual aid), they are self-managed with little hierarchy, copyleft licence (e.g. GFDL corpus or share-alike) restricts private property rights and guarantees public use.

A large public wiki like Wikipedia or Anarchopedia is going to have special problems managing a whole political spectrum of contributors who see politics in a great variety of quite different ways.

One issue in selecting wiki code is which group of wiki end users are going to be inclined to contribute, simply because they know that user interface. For instance, using MediaWiki as we do here is likely to attract Wikipedia authors, sysops, etc., which may be good for some things and bad for others.

The sociology and power structure of large public wikis has not been very closely studied. Doing so is a key responsibility of Anarchopedia:Itself. It probably should begin with examination of faction, governance, power structure and regime change issues.