  The collective effort exceeds the sum of its parts when individuals
coordinate and regulate their activities and behaviors. This holds true even in
self-organizing systems with open, voluntary participation where coordination
occurs implicitly. Here, we analyze the non-functional actions of contributors,
administrators, and bots on Wikipedia, categorizing them by their asymmetric
authority: one-way oversight and two-way. This categorization helps us reveal
comparable patterns. First, we find remarkably consistent scaling factors for
each category relative to system size. Two-way coordination scales
superlinearly (with an exponent of $1.3$), while oversight coordination grows
sublinearly (with an exponent of $0.9$), suggesting an underlying mechanism for
coordination across communities. Second, we identify the hierarchical modular
structure of interactions as a key factor for the economy of scale in
coordination, and we propose a mathematical model to explain these results.
Finally, our temporal analysis shows a shift from two-way interactions to
one-way oversight as system size increases. This suggests the emergence of a
nascent hierarchical structure even in self-organizing systems, echoing Weber's
theory of organizational evolution.
