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Wikipedia Is Basically a Corporate Bureaucracy, Says Study (gizmodo.com)
Jennifer Ouellette, reporting for Gizmodo: Wikipedia is a voluntary organization dedicated to the noble goal of decentralized knowledge creation. But as the community has evolved over time, it has wandered further and further from its early egalitarian ideals, according to a new paper published in the journal Future Internet. In fact, such systems usually end up looking a lot like 20th-century bureaucracies. [...] This may seem surprising, since there is no policing authority on Wikipedia -- no established top-down means of control. The community is self-governing, relying primarily on social pressure to enforce the established core norms, according to co-author Simon DeDeo, a complexity scientist at Indiana University. [...] "You start with a decentralized democratic system, but over time you get the emergence of a leadership class with privileged access to information and social networks," DeDeo explained. "Their interests begin to diverge from the rest of the group. They no longer have the same needs and goals. So not only do they come to gain the most power within the system, but they may use it in ways that conflict with the needs of everybody else.""The Iron Law of Oligarchy, demonstrated by Wikipedia," wrote Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist at Caltech. "Rebel all you want, ultimately you become The Establishment."
Almost every time I have found an error on Wikipedia it turned out that someone else had already corrected it before, only to be reverted by someone who felt he owned the page. Usually they didn't provide an edit summary to explain why they reverted the correction, and often it was clear they had not in fact read the correction at all. It's really disheartening; more often than not I find myself sighing and moving on if I spot an error, even when it's as uncontroversial as a typo. The wiki spirit is dead and has been dead for a decade.