[p2p-research] Who Writes Wikipedia? (blog post by Aaron Swartz)

[Andy Robinson]

Not sure if anyone's interested, but this has already happened with some of
the Wikia sites - the one I'm familiar with is the Transformers wikia, whose
most regular editors forked into TFwiki.com in a dispute over imposed banner
ads on the Wikia site.

In my experience, Wikipedia has a lot of crap around it because there's a
bewildering array of rules and policies, admins have a lot of power and the
place also attracts the online equivalent of curtain-twitchers, who use and
abuse both procedural and 'illegal' lines of action for their own
advantage.  I've contributed a few times and had perfectly good articles or
paragraphs removed over all kinds of nit-picking, most of it subjective.
There is a horrible "mission creep" - policies which don't look bad on the
surface, and were introduced for clear reasons, undergoing
passive-aggressive misuse as a way to fight disputes over different
opinions, to keep out rival viewpoints and so on.

This said, any project of this kind would have to have some way to handle
content disputes where users are committed enough to persist in reverting or
repeating edits (which is a very different issue from outright "vandalism",
though often conflated).  One possibility might be to have redirects to
different versions of the same article.
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