Canceling Disputes: How Social Capital Affects the Arbitration of Disputes on Wikipedia

This article examines how social capital affects the resolution of disputes by focusing on English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, sometimes described as “Wikipedia’s Supreme Court.” Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, the article contends that the Arbitration Committee not only examine...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Law & social inquiry 2024-05, Vol.49 (2), p.1060-1081
Main Author: Grisel, Florian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Arbitration
Collaboration
Committees
Compliance
Computer Science
Computers and Society
Decision making
Disputes
Editing
Editors
Egalitarianism
Encyclopedias
Humanities and Social Sciences
Information sources
Internet
Law
Narratives
Noncompliance
Sanctions
Social capital
Supreme courts
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Summary:This article examines how social capital affects the resolution of disputes by focusing on English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, sometimes described as “Wikipedia’s Supreme Court.” Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, the article contends that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially considers the position of each disputant within the community of editors in its decision-making process. In doing so, the Arbitration Committee does not simply decide or arbitrate disputes but seeks to attenuate their impact on Wikipedia’s social fabric. This data allows us to revisit sociological debates on the role of social capital, by revealing the ways in which well-connected individuals employ it strategically in order to obfuscate their noncompliance with norms, thus leading to what I call “dispute cancellation.”
ISSN:0897-6546
1747-4469
1545-696X
DOI:10.1017/lsi.2023.15