I should also note that I’ve added an assignment this semester that asks students to write a technical description/extended definition for Wikipedia itself. It makes students think differently about Wikipedia – and what they write, considering it’s for Wikipedia editors and readers. I’m curious to see how it will play out in terms of how they conduct research for the remainder of our assignments.

BTW – I’m a student in Prof. Dull’s class who’s part of Virginia Tech’s project. We’re just getting organized and many of the students had the very same questions you raise here, with the Wikipedia ambassador giving the exact same answer you did.

Hypothesis #5 raised a question for me. Are minorities less likely to engage in e-government because they are overwhelmingly under-represented in congress (African Americans make up 13% U.S. population, only 9.5% congress, Hispanic 14% U.S. population, only 4% congress)?

Finally, access to e-government is controlled primarily by private companies. That is, internet providers in cities and rural areas are private companies (e.g., Comcast). They set the prices for internet access. How might you reconcile this dilemma in hopes of providing internet access (and e-government access) to more individuals?

Legitimacy is a funny thing because it is a means to an end, as well as an end itself. At what point has the organization (or institution using the term interchangeably) achieved legitimacy; or put in other words? When does legitimation occur? If we think about legitimacy as means rather than an end, then the process of legitimation as an institutionalization mechanism becomes easier to operationalize and describe.

Secondly, if we think about legitimacy as some kind of a “living organism” that is born, grows, decays, and at some point, dies, then deligitimization as a de-institutionalization mechanism becomes important. I’ve found in my own research that the process of legitimation or the idea of acquiring “legitimacy-capital” may be the product of the loss of legitimacy of other actors competing for the same resources; this is often the case in revolutionary movements whose legitimacy is directly tied with the delegitization of the person or system they are trying to replace.