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Unpublished Paper
Hart v Finnis: How Will Positivism and Natural Law Account for the Socio-Legal Paradigm in Wikipedia?
ExpressO (2010)
  • Siyuan Chen, Singapore Management University
Abstract

There is little doubt that Wikipedia is one of the world’s most influential websites today – and its sphere of influence is set to grow in days to come. The evidence for this is strong. As of June 2010, Wikipedia is the internet’s 6th most popular website (by virtue of the Alexa Traffic Rank), and it is also the most popular “general reference” site in cyberspace, with more than 3 million articles in the English language edition. It has been and will continue to be the flagship of Web 2.0, with every single edit being potentially scrutinised by a global audience, and it is well on its way to becoming the world’s largest repository of knowledge and most consulted resource. Anyone who has any decent amount of experience using the internet will know that searching for anything on the internet via popular search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo! will almost invariably result in Wikipedia entries being ranked among the top 5 hits; as a result, anybody who has access to the internet would very likely have used Wikipedia in one way or another. And it is not uncommon for us to chance upon exceptionally well written and referenced articles with outstanding detail and scope. However, while everybody may be familiar with what Wikipedia is in a very general sense, not everybody is necessarily well acquainted with how Wikipedia actually governs itself – an increasingly complex society in cyberspace, as it were, with almost 100,000 “active contributors” from around the world working on the project, and hundreds of thousands of other unidentifiable or casual editors contributing hundreds of thousand edits on a daily basis as well. Specifically, one has to realise that for an international community of editors to build up the world’s largest encyclopedia effectively, a comprehensive array of internal regulations needs to be constantly designed (principally by the editors no less), refined (just like any other article in the encyclopedia), and adhered to, and indeed this is a very nuanced process that has been ongoing – and will continue to take place. This point is particularly significant, bearing in mind that Wikipedia by and large holds true to its widely known mantra as being “the free encyclopedia” that anyone is able to edit, at any place, and at any point in time. From the aforementioned realisation, a whole host of potentially intriguing socio-legal issues emerge.

To elaborate on what I mean: key to Wikipedia’s success (in terms of the scale and depth of the project and its current web presence) has been its intricate web of guidelines, ethical norms, philosophies, policies, rules, precedents, sanctions, administrative procedures, and dispute resolution and adjudication mechanisms (for convenience, I will refer to these entities in this paper collectively as “regulations”) that govern how editors and administrators should edit, provide input on policies, shift balances of power, behave, and interact with each other. A safe prediction will be that this intricate web will only become even more intricate as Wikipedia forges ahead to increase its encyclopedic legitimacy. Necessarily, from a socio-legal viewpoint, a question of tremendous interest is why should these regulations be binding, without exception, on editors who – given that Wikipedia is what I describe as essentially an evolving microcosm of an international community, or more boldly, a multicultural society constantly mutating in the strong sense of the word – come from different backgrounds and have different values and beliefs? Then there are even more precise questions: how, and why is it that certain regulations have the elevated status of enforceable rules, and some are merely general guidelines; what is the normative basis of the mandate bestowed upon administrators to govern other editors, since Wikipedia is not a democracy (but predicated on the rather elusive and abused concept of consensus) and yet administrators are in effect “voted” in; can arbitration hearings (for resolving serious disputes between users) be conducted fairly in cyberspace; how and why do new norms even come into existence and how and why are they modified; and last but not least, why, in the first place, and assuming that they have the choice, do editors obey the regulations? And the list of questions continues.

This paper therefore humbly endeavours – an attempt unprecedented in the legal academic context it seems – to examine, from a jurisprudential or legal theory viewpoint, how and why regulations made and adhered to in Wikipedia are made and adhered to by Wikipedians. Even though Wikipedia is not intuitively associated with a “conventional” legal system with a keen focus on traditional judicial elements that govern “society” as is popularly conceived (an association that is probably the progeny of orthodox legal theory), it is still highly plausible and indeed purposeful to examine Wikipedia’s system of rules (that have a technical aspect and a social aspect – the former governing editing and the latter governing behaviour), enforcement measures and adjudication devices within the context of the larger and ever enigmatic questions, “What is law?” or “What is the nature of law?”, both of which are also connected to the question of “What exactly causes people to obey the law?” Can any legal theory possibly come close to answering these questions?

Keywords
  • Wikipedia,
  • Hart,
  • Finnis,
  • Jurisprudence
Disciplines
Publication Date
September 16, 2010
Citation Information
Siyuan Chen. "Hart v Finnis: How Will Positivism and Natural Law Account for the Socio-Legal Paradigm in Wikipedia?" ExpressO (2010)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/siyuan_chen/8/