Making Consensus Sensible: The Transition of a Democratic Ideal into Wikipedia’s Interface

Wikipedia is composed from consensus. Discussion by discussion, article by article, the “online encyclopedia that anyone can edit” holds a steady drumbeat toward agreement. While it is often positioned as a self-evident good, its usage on Wikipedia is not without concern. In this paper I mobilize Chantal Mouffe’s (2000) feminist critical political theory and Johanna Drucker’s (2014) methods of interface analysis to raise important questions about the relationship between consensus and peer production. Through a discourse analysis of consensus
as an ideal and a technique, I identify the multitude of ways that Wikipedians perform consensus: not only through understanding and decision-making, but also through acts of composing, showing, processing, closing, and calculating. However, because Wikipedia’s socio-technical vision is over-determined by consensus, its political design is ill-equipped to address the political conditions of pluralist societies. As a result, I identify the reasons why Wikipedia should strengthen its democratic commitment by engaging with dissensus. By conducting this research, I demonstrate how consensus has transitioned from a democratic ideal into an interface and why it should be re-imagined within peer production projects.