I’m not sure which Wikipedia Annalee was using. I quit contributing content to the Wikipedia I had tried after I saw one too many entries, including some of my own, redacted or deleted by rules-lawyer vandals in service of some bizarre ideal of “public good”, with the explicit cover of the management.

I think that “bottom-up censorship” is a poor description of this phenomenon, as the top-down management practices are the root cause of the listed social problems. Notice that the listed examples are all actually examples of bottom-up interacting with an ill-conceived content management plan. For a positive example, I’d suggest looking instead at a site like tvtropes.org which operates in the true “wiki way”, with almost no explicit content management at all.

It turns out that giving true power to the people to control the content of their informational spaces tends to work better than authoritarian rules. Spammers and trolls flourish not because the polis has too much control, but because it has too little. When you actually give the community the power to police itself, as true wikis and some muds do, folks tend to judge communications according to their intention rather than according to their content. You want that first thing.

Thanks much, Dawn, for blogging this stuff!