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:

Unlike most sites on the Internet that solicit "user generated content", no registration, no email, no identification is needed before someone can change a Wikipedia page. It would seem self-evident that this "open editing" model would lead to uncontrollable chaos and absolute disaster, yet completely counter to intuition, it has produced the... See more

Larry Sanger said: "wikis don't work if people aren't bold" Wikipedia says: "be bold in editing, moving, and modifying articles, because the joy of editing is that, although it should aim for, perfection is not required. And do not worry about messing up. All prior versions of articles are kept, so there is no way that you can accidentally damage... See more

It is perhaps an interesting coincidence that the wiki page where new users are encouraged to experiment and "play" safely is called the Sandbox.... "sidewalks work because they permit local interactions to create global order... the information networks of sidewalk life are fine-grained enough to permit higher-level learning to emerge"

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... See more

A core idea Wikipedia embraced, borrowed from the original MeatballWiki, was to assume good faith (AGF) when interacting with others. The guidelined promoted optimistic production rather than pessimistic nay-saying, and reds, "unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, assume that people who work on the project are trying to help it, not hurt... See more

For many wikipedians, the act of participating in article making is also an act of learning. This is a dynamic most outside readers don't often see or experience. Writing about subjects while abiding by Wikipedia's neutral point of view requires research, critical thinking, and weighing the facts. Contributors often find themselves learning by... See more

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... See more