The challenge at the heart of collective action is how cooperative behavior emerges when there are apparent reasons for it not to. This is famously demonstrated by the Prisoner's Dilemma in which two co-suspects have compelling cause to defect -- turn informer -- against the other but the consequent of both following such a strategy is worse than had they cooperated and remained silent (Axelrod 1984). That it, if your partner remains silent, you will get six months in jail if you are also silent, but you go free by defecting and saddling your partner with a ten year sentence. If your partner informs on you, and you do the same, you each receive five years unless you're the sucker and get ten. Defecting is the dominant "equilibrium" state regardless of your partner's choice: going free is preferable to six months; five years is preferable to ten. So both players defect, get five year sentences, and wish they had remained silent and gotten off with six months. The dilemma is that the individual's dominant strategy also creates a mutually suboptimal result; in this case, fear of the worst-case scenario inhibits beneficial collective action. Understanding the distance between the lack of cooperation implied by the dominant strategy and the mutual benefits of cooperation has been a central concern of social science since Garrett Hardin's (1968) article "The Tragedy of the Commons." In this scenario, the dominant strategy of a herder is to put as many animals as possible on common land, despite the fact that if everyone were to do the same it would soon be overgrazed. A few years before, in 1965, Mancur Olson (1971) published a book by which he characterized this type of problem as "The Logic of Collective Action."

Olson, considering production rather than consumption, asks who would contribute to a common public good when they might just as easily defect and "free ride"? Yet, again, should everyone follow this reasoning, no public goods will be produced. Olson provides an extensive taxonomy of group characteristics that affect this logic, including their size and interdependence, the market's demand elasticity, the balance of costs and benefits, and the ability for a group to exclude or penalize those who fail to contribute. (Ultimately, "trust" becomes a central element in such group dynamics and might arise in the context of time and reputation, institutional controls, or group norms.)

Around the same time, Robert Trivers (1971) characterized a related problem in animal behavior. In his article "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism," he defined an "altruistic situation" as one in which "one individual can dispense a benefit to a second greater than the cost of the act to himself" (Trivers 1971) and modeled the conditions under which altruistic behaviors were likely to emerge. (Like Olson, these relate to the character and extent of social interaction.) Of course, as noted by Frans de Waal (2008), "a return-benefits calculation typically remains beyond the animals cognitive horizon" and altruism itself is likely the result of a more proximate evolved behavior: empathy. (This link between empathy and altruism is hypothesized, outside of the evolutionary context, by Daniel Batson (1991).)

Recently, these two threads of political economy and evolution have been combined in the work of Elinor Ostrom. In "Governing the Commons" she makes a slight digression away from a macro-political perspective to note that "communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time" (Ostrom1990gce). By studying such institutions she recommends that the dilemma of "common pool resources" might be addressed by eight institutional design principles: clearly defined boundaries, congruence between appropriation/provision rules and local conditions, collective-choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict-resolution mechanisms, state recognition of groups' right to self-organize, and the nesting of enterprises in large systems.

More recently, Ostrom makes greater use of the evolutionary approach to focus on the emergence of norms (Ostrom 2000). She takes issue with Olson's (1971) earlier claim that unless the group is small, or there is a way to force individuals to act in their common interest, "rational self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests." She characterizes this as Olson's "zero contribution thesis" and notes that it contradicts everyday experience; the problem of free riding exists, but community governance regimes do emerge and persist (Ostrom 2000). While it might be "irrational" from the egoist perspective, a significant proportion of people will act cooperatively (i.e., 40-60% of people will initially contribute to the public good in a finite-round game). This cooperation is affected by factors such as expectations about others, and the framing and number of interactions between peers. And, in keeping with Olson, people will expend resources to punish those who make below average contributions. Hence Ostrom characterizes norms as those values (e.g., reciprocity, fairness, and trustworthiness) that affect the preference for cooperation. If there is a sufficient proportion of "norm using" players (i.e., conditional cooperators and willing punishers), this "creates an opening for collective action" (Ostrom 2000). This is especially so if there is good information about the trustworthiness of one's peers. If cooperation has been successfully established, new members will likely be appropriately acculturated. Hence, collective action and their supportive social norms can emerge in an evolutionary context: the gap of the cooperative dilemma can be bridged. Indeed, Olson recommends her eight institutional mechanisms (or "principles") to further such outcomes.

Recently, a number of scholars have applied this literature on collective action to Wikipedia. Johnson (2007) uses Ostrom to characterize vandalism and point-of-view (POV) pushing as collective action problems. Viegas, Wattenberg, and Mckeon (2007) argue that Wikipedia's Featured Article process reflects Ostrom's first four principles of locality, collective choice (participation), monitoring (accountability) and conflict resolution. Andrea Forte and Amy Buckman (2008) use all eight of Ostrom's design principles to evaluate Wikipedia governance and its Biography of Living Persons policy; they argue that there is decentralized policy creation, interpretation (i.e., its Arbitration Committee) and enforcement (i.e., administrators) but conclude the biggest lack relative to Ostrom is the uneven enforcement of policy.

However, these works tend to remain focused at an institutional level, focusing on community mechanisms for content and membership policy. (Two exceptions are a quantitative analysis of patterns in Wikipedian references to policies and guidelines from discussion pages (Beschastnikh, Kriplean, and Mcdonald 2008) and a characterization of the type of "utterances" used on Discussion pages (Goldspink 2009).) If, following Ostrom, we can think of norms as those values (e.g., reciprocity, fairness, and trustworthiness) that affect the preference for cooperation, can we find and characterize such norms in Wikipedia culture? I believe we can, and this is the focus of my work on Wikipedia.

Might we even characterize prosocial norms as a form of morality, in the sense employed by Bowles and Gintis (1998)? Indeed, despite preceding theorists of collective action by almost two centuries, Kant's (2005) categorical imperative is a moral response to the collective action dilemma: "I ought never to act in such a way that I couldn't also will that the maxim on which I act should be a universal law." Coincidently, the lesser well known subtitle to Hardin's famous "Tragedy of the Commons" article is "the population problem has no technical solution; it requires an extension in morality." Therefore, I do not think it is a stretch to conclude that Wikipedia collaboration is as much a "moral" problem as a technical one.