Insularity, editorial abuses, jargon, anonymity, power… some of the difficulties that beset the great public knowledge experiment of our day. Our friend Karen Schneider has a smart piece on Wikipedia’s “awkward adolescence.” Worth a read.

Like a startup maturing into a real business, Wikipedia’s corporate culture seems, at times, conflicted between its role as a harmless nouveau-digital experiment and its broader ambitions.
…The quieter rumblings about Wikipedia have less to do with vanity edits or poor maintenance of content than they do with the organization’s increasingly arbitrary editorial overrides and deletions and rapidly thickening in-group culture.
…Sock puppets, spy-versus-spy hijinks, and super-secret-vocabularies may be fine for a short-term experiment in information management; but Wikipedia positions itself not as a free encyclopedia, but the free encyclopedia. A FAQ claims, “We want Wikipedia to be around at least a hundred years from now, if it does not turn into something even more significant,” and Wikipedia’s fundraising page asks potential donors to “Imagine a world in which every single person can share freely in the sum of human knowledge.”