Wikipedia: Anarchy or Hierarchy?

The premise is the problem. Did you think that free software projects don't have leadership, or that everyone's patches go in? That there are no property rules, thus no exclusion based on ownership, does not imply an absence of organization altogether. But unlike the State, which employs coercion to secure consent, anarchist institutions base their power on consent.

So by measuring the wrong quantity you get a problematic measurement. Yes, it requires organization to manage dozens of encyclopedias everyone can edit around the world. It requires organization to make the Linux kernel. In neither case do property rights either determine the structure or function of the organization, nor do they flow from organization's activity. What proposition are you testing: mine or a straw man's?

This is the reification of the false premise. The proposition you're supposed to be testing is that Wikipedia's superiority lies in the absence of property relations determining who can produce there. At least if you're testing any proposition I advanced. But now you have smuggled in some other question and are pretending it's the same.

You might want to do a little original research by talking to people who are Wikipedia editors. Even better would be to spend a little time involved yourself. Then you would see that you're confronting here one of the basic problems of reporting, ethnography, and legal investigation: factually accurate statements offered without context can constitute absurd misrepresentation. Here each of the statements you make could be correct (though the statistics are misleading and the quote from Jimmy is very far out of context), but the effect overall is not likely to sound like reality to anyone who actually lives in the Wikipedia community. The comments below show that with respect to marginal participants; you will find it also true if you talk to official community leaders, heavily-involved editors, or the academic outreach volunteers around you. Even talking to students who write for Wikipedia in one of my other courses might teach you what you need to know in order to interpret the data you offer, in line with the context that really exists.

The Wikipedia elite's control over content raises the specter of exclusion. Because Wikipedia bureaucrats are generally users who contribute and edit a disproportionately large amount of site content, administrators may preference content that is consistent with (or at least does not question) their own edits.

Do you have any evidence whatever to offer on this "may"? Or does it mean "I have no evidence whatever to offer, but I think I'll say this anyway because it conforms to my desired view of the universe?"

The 50% of edits that the 99% of users make must therefore survive the scrutiny of a distinctly self-interested group.

This "self-interest" of the self-interested group was established by the "may" in the previous sentence. That is, users' edits "must" survive the scrutiny of the self-interest that "may" exist. Which is nothing but pure fantasy masquerading as informed reporting. The fact, however, is that everyone's edits must survive everyone else's scrutiny. So the best questions would probably involve finding out how articles really develop. Because every page has a complete history one can read, as every page in this wiki saves all its versions, it's possible to look directly at the evidence left by editing. Why didn't you pick a few Wikipedia articles in areas of interest or intellectual specialization for you and actually assess the history of the editing? That would have taught you much less than actually involving yourself in the process of producing an article, but at least it would beat making it all up as you go along.

Even if administrators are entirely "objective" decisionmakers, the potential for and perception of bureaucratic abuse and/or bias may be sufficient to discourage participation.

Only, as commentators pointed out, unless it isn't. For there to be such discouragement, other people would have to take your speculation about how Wikipedia works seriously, instead of finding out for themselves how it works by interacting with it, in which case they are unlikely to reach your conclusion.

Whether the Wikipedia elite actually skew content development in favor of bureaucratic viewpoints and preferences may actually be a secondary issue because their mere existence reduces users' confidence in a meaningful, good-faith review process.

What? What are these "bureaucratic viewpoints"? Wikipedia's policies are explicit. The "neutral point of view" is the viewpoint required, and the test is citation of secondary (only secondary) sources reflecting the full span of published opinion on all controverted points. Do you have any evidence of this second-order process of discouragement of potential contributors or editors resulting from your hypothetical problem of some supposed (but evidenceless) tendency of high-involvement editors to adopt or favor viewpoints unpermitted by policy?

If users come to believe their edits will stand or fall not according to their merits, but rather according to the subjective preferences of the Wikipedia elite, it follows that participation will feel restricted--and users will be excluded--by virtue of Wikipedia's hierarchy.

And your evidence that this "coming to belief" occurs on the basis of these supposed subjective preferences of the editorial elite, for which in turn there hasn't been any evidence presented yet?

The effects of Wikipedia's bureaucratization go further, however, as they present potential editors with non-trivial costs. A 2009 Wall Street Journal article explained that 49,000 editors left Wikipedia in the first quarter of 2009--10 times more than left in the first quarter of 2008--because of the "plethora of rules Wikipedia has adopted to bring order to its unruly universe -- particularly to reduce infighting among contributors about write-ups of controversial subjects and polarizing figures."

Aside from the question of sourcing, would you have any evidence that the drop in editors was because of policy changes? (The actual size of the drop, in English, was approximately 12,000, from 90,000 to 78,000, rather than the larger and quite improbable number presented by the Journal. There were also declines in Wikipedias, like the German edition, in which the same policy changes were not made.) A significant source of editorial departure, Wikimedia found, was job loss, which was somewhat more common in the world during the first quarter of 2009 than the first quarter of 2008.

To the extent new editors must understand the Wikipedia power structure, conform to a Manual of Style, adhere to templates, contend with highly motivated and more technologically powerful users, and shape their content in a way that makes its removal and/or alteration less likely, participation in the Wikipedia community involves costs that may have the same exclusionary impact that traditional property rights effect.

Not, not the same. Different. Property rights effect either an absolute exclusion or an exclusion one can only overcome if one has enough money and pays it. These barriers to entry, on the other hand, can be lowered by a process called education. The Wikipedia community conducts a great deal of education, for free, designed to help people learn to use the Wikipedia effectively in all the ways you've mentioned. My students in AmLegalHist this term are working with an academic outreach editor at Wikipedia, learning how to overcome the obstacles you mention in order to make parts of their academic work in my class accessible to others through Wikipedia. You might want to talk to one of them.

In other words, where the absence of property rights opened the door to participation in the Wikipedia community, an increasingly complex set of rules governing participation may be having the opposite effect by placing the Wikipedia savvy at a clear advantage in the editing process vis-a-vis newcomers and technology novices.

This "may be having" is also a marker for evidenceless assertion.

While these barriers are not the result of a legal regime akin to copyright, their exclusionary consequences are nevertheless comparable to property rights'. It therefore seems overly formalistic to credit anarchism for Wikipedia's qualitative superiority on the ground that its exclusionary rules, while significant, are not products of property rights.

All of this to conclude that my argument, which was not based on words but on things, is formalist? This formalism of mine, if I understand you correctly, results from my failure to observe the phenomena for which you have no evidence, as a result of which I stated a possible general rule that accounted for all the observations except the ones you made up?

Finally, Wikipedia faces operational realities and, as a result, accepts donations from private (often corporate) entities in order to finance its operations. While these donors may not exert direct influence over Wikipedia, they nevertheless impose, indirectly, their expectations and values on the organization's leaders.

"Impose"? Are you serious? Do you think that people donate money to organizations like Wikimedia without sharing its values, planning to "impose" values on the organization? That's not reality so far as I know it, and I both run a non-profit and provide some informal advice to the Wikimedia leadership and board. In the world as I know it, people give to organizations such as Wikimedia because they already share its values.

To the extent Wikipedia relies on these entities, its content faces an outer limit of its benefactors' values and/or expectations. To stay within this limit, it seems inevitable that content will be excluded notwithstanding users' preferences.

What? Why would Wikimedia ever take a donation from someone who had a condition to exclude content? And why would it ever listen to a donor who tried to censor an article after donating? Do you think that the board, elected by the community and not appointed by leadership or (therefore) donors, would permit such an outcome? Yet this quite implausible outcome has become "inevitable" simply by the process of assertion without evidence. That doesn't meet minimum standards of intellectual responsibility.