Carl Miller suggests that Wikipedia could be a model for policymakers:
[R]ealizing digital democracy is hard. Iceland’s attempts to do so for their constitution descended into acrimony. As Matthew Hindman has argued, the Internet hasn’t really broadened political discourse much at all – rather it has empowered a small set of elites. While hundreds of thousands of people blog about politics, only a handful of these blogs are actually read. Anyone can be on Twitter, but celebrities and journalists are more likely to be followed than you or me …
Amid these challenges, Wikipedia stands out as a twinkling beacon of hope. …
The English version [of Wikipedia] alone is 60 times larger than the last great repository of human knowledge in the English language, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and nearly as accurate. But it is also a model for how to turn an elite-driven process into a democratic one. Britannica is written by 100 full-time editors and a few thousand contributors. Wikipedia has 21,395,915 accounts on Wikipedia and 270,000 are active on a monthly basis. It has achieved something that mainstream politics has cause to envy: the routine, active engagement of hundreds of thousands of willing volunteers of often radically different background and opinion to create something used, supported, and trusted by millions. There is an exciting opportunity here: to see whether Wikipedia and Wikipedians can teach us how to improve engagement with formal politics.
The Dish 