Clay has some interesting notes on criticism of Wikipedia

It’s been fascinating to watch the Kubler-Ross stages of people committed to Wikipedia’s failure: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Denial was simple; people who didn’t think it was possible simply dis-believed. But the numbers kept going up. Then they got angry, perhaps most famously in the likening of the Wikipedia to a public toilet by a former editor for Encyclopedia Brittanica. Sanger’s post marks the bargaining phase; “OK, fine, the Wikipedia is interesting, but whatever we do, lets definitely make sure that we change it into something else rather than letting the current experiment run unchecked.â€?

But what I thought was really interesting was his comments on governance, and tensions of governance, and openness. They really resonated with my IMC experience and framed the problem in a new light. > Governance is a certified Hard Problem(TM), and at the extremes, co-creation, openess, and scale are incompatible. The Wikipedia’s principle advantage over other methods of putting together a body of knowledge is openess, and from the outside, it looks like the Wikipedia’s guiding principle is “Be as open as you can be; close down only where there is evidence that openess causes more harm than good; when this happens, reduce openess in the smallest increment possible, and see if that fixes the problem.â€? Lather, rinse, repeat.

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This pattern means that there will always be problems with governance on the Wikipedia, by definition

And that is okay, in fact it’s desirable. I think that is a really interesting benchmark/realization. In any group committed to openness (aka any form of governance that could be accurately labeled democratic), governance will always be a problem.