Talk:Wikipedia and the Politics of Mass Collaboration
Bravo! This is an awesome sweet page, toward greater granularity and specification of elements of collaborative schema.
One of Speer's terms, "abstract" collaboration, threw me a bit. Do I understand this correctly as indirect or incidental collaboration, as in the maker of a tool used by collaborators being an abstract collaborator?
Per Speer: "every rule in [free] collaboration is changeable and negotiable. Absolutely nothing is off limits or beyond question. There is no “higher authority” (Spehr, 2007, p. 92) and every person has “the same power to influence the rules” (Spehr and Windszus, 2004, n.p.)."
Speer's ideal obviously doesn't apply to cases like Wikipedia or any mass collaboration that I can imagine. And the power of self-withdrawal is negligible in a large group, and the bit about "masks" seems, as you say, more often a tool of domination (conformity) than freedom. Thus free or "relatively free" collaboration remains to be elaborated for actual or credible cases. I guess minimizing or mitigating the typical forms of domination is the point of departure...
I look forward to more from Nathaniel Tkacz on this.