Panel 5.5. Understanding Governance Across Peer-Produced Knowledge Commons’ Lifecycles
co-Chairs: Sneha Narayan1, Benjamin Mako Hill2, and Sohyeon Hwang3
1Carleton College, 2University of Washington, 3Princeton University
The largest and most studied peer-produced knowledge commons—projects like Wikipedia, free/libre open source software projects like GNU/Linux, and so on—are now decades old. As knowledge commons have grown and matured, they face a shifting range of new governance challenges related to protecting the valuable information goods they have created, such as increasing audience size and diversity, data use by and contributions from AI, coordinated cybersecurity attacks and misinformation campaigns, increased newcomer rejection, and dwindling engagement in governance activity, to name just a few. This panel aims to bring together researchers seeking to document these shifting challenges and how peer-production communities respond to them, while taking stock of the effectiveness of these responses. In particular, we hope to showcase research that takes advantage of the unique features of knowledge commons (such as the availability of detailed longitudinal data, or comparative data across populations of knowledge commons) to analyze these governance challenges across time, and between communities. The panel would be excited to present research revisiting empirical settings that served as sites of earlier work on knowledge commons to describe what has changed.
Monday, June 16, 2025 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM Hasbrouck Hall HAS 137
The Growth and Decline of Digital Knowledge Commons
in-person
Benjamin Mako Hill
"After increasing rapidly over seven years, the number of active contributors to English Wikipedia peaked in 2007 and has been in decline since. Of course, Wikipedia is only one example of ""peer production""—a model of collaborative production that also lies behind millions of wikis, free/open source software projects, websites like OpenStreetMap, and more. Unfortunately, there is evidence that English Wikipedia's pattern of growth and decline occurs in these other efforts as well. A body of emerging scholarship suggests that decline in projects' contributor bases tends to coincide with a shift from the lightweight governance and porous boundaries closely associated with peer production to less open forms of organization.
Why would successful peer production communities become less open in ways that cause a decline in their contributor bases? Drawing from research into collective action and public goods as well as Ostrom's work on common-pool resources, I will present a theoretical model that suggests an answer. I will argue that peer production projects' success at building valuable knowledge commons drives both a virtuous cycle of good contributions as well as well an influx of bad-faith actors in a dynamic set of relationships that leads communities to become increasingly closed in order to protect the knowledge bases they have built. I will end by presenting a range of empirical evidence in support of the model and by discussing some of its implications.
"
