User:Risker/Sandbox3

Over the last 18 months, but particularly in the past two or three, I've been reflecting on the entire "problem" with the Wikipedia community, and this proposed case brings a large number of those "problems" to a head. The crux of the situation is that the Wikipedia that "we" imagine is not the Wikipedia that exists, and there's pretty good reason to doubt it ever existed except in the imagination.

Fact is, Wikipedia reflects the culture in which it exists. When it was a small website, it had the problems of a small town. Now that it is on the world stage, it still has many of the same problems, but they are magnified by size and complicated by the addition of numerically stronger contingents representing different customs, practices and viewpoints. Those differences were actively sought out, and continue to be even today, in accordance with the core principle that (almost) anyone can edit.

One thing is clear, though. Wikipedia was never The Donna Reed Show. Even in its earliest days, there were edit wars, people were rude to each other, there were content disputes, people more interested in messing up the encyclopedia walked through the open doors, and some people spent a lot of time trying to solve interpersonal issues. These things haven't changed, they have only become magnified because there are so many more people involved.

At the same time, the Wikipedia community has matured considerably, in part because of the wider range of technical and content-producing abilities, the development of specialized roles, and the explosion of online access to information, but also because the community has learned from experience and developed structures that support the development of the encyclopedia. It's disorganized and messy, and some of the foundations are rather shaky, but over time the weaker links are strengthened. Unfortunately, sometimes weaker links that should be disassembled are shored up as well, making it that much harder to correct the problems they cause, but that's inevitable as time goes on.

One of the greatest challenges, as the encyclopedia and the community have matured, is that those who have been around since the earliest times sometimes have a hard time understanding that Wikipedia isn't quite what they thought it was in the first place. Scholarly types leave, throwing their hands in the air, because their scholarship doesn't give them an advantage over an amateur - but non-credentialism was built into the system from Day One. People who perceive themselves to be leaders fail to recognize that the questioning nature of the community will naturally include a questioning of its structures and governance. The rather simplistic concept of "consensus", which was initially thought to mean that the best resolutions would naturally gain the strongest support, has simply come to mean "very strong support" as the number of voices has come forward with a plethora of ideas.