This article examines how Wikipedians embed their sovereign authority within the development of the site’s multilingual policy environment. By drawing on the concepts of cultural techniques, imagined affordances, and online authority, the edits and comments of editors were examined through a discourse analysis of 15 rules across 15 years. With a focus on the English and Spanish-language Wikipedias and additional comparisons with the Arabic, Dutch, and French-language editions, our analysis presents a new perspective on Wikipedian self-governance. By paying attention to how Wikipedians designate the authority of rules through templates, we observed that an incredibly small number of editors use techniques to designate the sovereign authority of policies in ways that determine community consensus, rather than reflect it. This research provides further understanding of the democratic limitations of online peer production and self-governing communities dedicated to equal and diverse forms of participation.

中文翻译：

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模板和主权：维基百科的政策发展和社区共识的反映

本文研究了维基百科人如何将他们的主权权威嵌入到网站的多语言政策环境的发展中。通过借鉴文化技术、想象的可供性和在线权威的概念，通过对 15 年中 15 条规则的话语分析来检查编辑的编辑和评论。通过关注英语和西班牙语维基百科，并与阿拉伯语、荷兰语和法语版本进行额外比较，我们的分析为维基百科自治提供了新的视角。通过观察维基百科人如何通过模板指定规则的权威，我们观察到极少数的编辑者使用技术来指定政策的主权权威，从而决定社区共识，而不是反映它。这项研究进一步了解了在线同行生产和致力于平等和多样化参与形式的自治社区的民主局限性。