Benjamin Mako Hill: What makes online groups vulnerable to governance capture?

For nearly a decade, the Croatian language version of Wikipedia was run by a cabal of far-right nationalists who edited articles in ways that promoted fringe political ideas and involved cases of historical revisionism related to the Ustaše regime, a fascist movement that ruled the Nazi puppet state called the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. However, we also found that the two projects diverged early in their trajectories in how open they remained to new contributors ascending to local governance positions and in the degree to which they privileged informal relationships over formal rules and processes as the project’s organizing principles. Ultimately, Croatian’s relative lack of bureaucratic openness and rules constraining administrator behavior created a window of opportunity for a motivated contingent of editors to seize control of the governance mechanisms of the project.