The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia

Durova's fourth law: small organizations run on relationships. Formal policies emerge when the organization becomes too large to operate on that basis. Policies continue to grow in both quantity and complexity in proportion to organizational growth until the policies no longer work, at which point policies remain in place while the organization rev... See more

One Wikipedian, with the handle of Durova, is pessimistic about the ability of Wikipedia to remain personable. She came up with a formulation that seems to track Wikipedia's evolution:

...the ever-increasing feature set of the Wki markup language has become more arcane and more user-unfriendly. Even a new user who braves the community policies is likely to be scared off by the increasing complexity of the markup language.

The lack of top down editorial oversight resulted in uneven development of Wikipedia's articles, oftentimes with stark examples: The biography of Britney Spears takes up nearly twice the space as the one for Socrates.

Wikipedia had to deal with unique problems, since anybody could edit. With its popularity, spam and shameless self-promotion became a constant problem. These were challenges predecessors didn't have to face. Pasting a sales brochure into the Web pages of Britannica was impossible, yet this phenomenon was a continual battle for Wikipedia's patroller... See more

Eventualism has become an accepted norm in the community, because by default since the beginning of the project, starting from nothing, articles have overwhelmingly benefited from multiple eyeballs (and edits).

There are a range of topics that are always being disupted between inclusionists and deletionists. It's the borderline cases that are the hardest. A long-running battle has been about whether or not to have an article about each and every school that exists. Each college or university certainly deserves one, but what about each and every middle or ... See more

Unlike other encyclopedias throughout history, Wikipedia has no physical limit on how many pages it can contain.... also, in the age of Google search and hypertext, people can come across Wikipedia's content through any number of avenues... The idea of a volume or alphabetical order is completely irrelevant to a modern Internet encyclopedia. Althou... See more

Since the Web 2.0 era is about user-generated content, it can be a show to newcomers who are not used to the idea when they come to Wikipedia. The community practice of not waiting for a fancy solution and just getting your hands dirty has spawned a special mantra (or admonishment): SOFIXIT.