ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on a promise that lies at the heart of digital modernity: that crowds are wiser than experts. We focus on Wikipedia as a paradigmatic case to examine digital modernity's epistemology. We find that the online encyclopedia does deliver on its promise of epistemological democratization – succeeding in composing the most comprehensive repository of human knowledge in history. At the same time, while Wikipedia's content is crowd-sourced, its infrastructure is controlled by a hierarchically structured organization. Its success and relative equality moreover in large part stem precisely from its bureaucratization – reflecting both digital modernity's potential for democratizing knowledge and the inherent limitations of decentralization.
