Wikipedia’s claim of being the premiere source of democratized knowledge on the planet might soon be called into question as meatspace politics begin to infect its culture. “Begin to” might be a bit of an understatement. Since its inception, much of the editing power of Wikipedia has been in the hands of about 1000 hand picked editors. Now, according to the Telegraph, those editors are beginning to split across two distinct party lines.

Warring Houses

From The Telegraph,

The group is forming itself into two factions: inclusionists and deletionists. The deletionists say that an encyclopedia is not a dumping ground for facts; standards of notability have to be upheld or their pages will fill with trivia. Inclusionists reply that Wikipedia’s great advantage is that it has no space limit and that an entry of interest to just a few people is justified. Niche articles will never trouble most people, since access is through search.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Worse than a little political maneuvering, however, is that article submissions on a whole are beginning to slow as a result of a Wikipedia editing structure that is becoming more and more difficult to understand as a casual user. Wikipedia has reached a scale where it would be difficult to unseat it as the largest source of user editable content on the web, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t immune to alienating that community.

Wikipedia relies exclusively on the support of its users for its survival. Most of Wikipedia’s funding comes directly from these user donations. Since these same users are often drawn to the ideal that Wikipedia is different than the huge Reference companies, adding structure at the expense of principles might be a serious problem for the project.

Maybe this battle between the “deletionists” and “inclusionists” while finally give some voice to these fears, and the answer to the question of whether truly collaborative editing can exist at scale.

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