Wikipedia is administered by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), an American non-profit, but day-to-day operations – everything from writing articles to patrolling for vandalism – are conducted by a pseudonymous army of unpaid "editors", chaperoned by a cadre of privileged users called "administrators".
Ironically for a community with quasi-anarchist ideals, Wikipedia has organically developed a law code of policies and guidelines to rival any nation-state's, and a byzantine socio-bureaucratic edifice of WikiProjects, noticeboards, and community forums.
Wikipedia maintains a mammoth in-house style guide and detailed guidelines for everything from naming conventions for clergy to articles about figure skating. The community has a monthly newsletter, an annual editing competition, regular 'backlog drives' for various kinds of clean-up, and formal peer-review processes for accrediting articles as a 'Good Article' or 'Featured Article'. There is a Guild of Copy Editors and a Counter-Vandalism Unit. There is a years-long initiative to write more articles about women and a Nintendo task force.
To administer this sprawling empire of content creation, Wikipedia has its own court system, elections, and consensus-driven legislative process. The "back-of-house" functions are so extensive that some editors barely touch mainspace – the user-facing encyclopedic articles – at all.
Because the editorial direction of the site is entirely determined by volunteer users, the selection and depth of topics sometimes reflects very idiosyncratic interests. Wikipedia has world-class coverage of snooker championships, New York City architecture, Great Lakes shipping, and Australian shrubs, in each case due to the predilection of a single highly industrious editor. The article on Billy Martin, an American professional baseball player in the 1950s, is longer than the article on Stalin.
Wikipedia is, famously, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In actual fact, a large majority of the site's content comes from a small group of dedicated editors, small enough that veterans easily recognize each other by name. Some have been identifiable characters on the Wikipedia scene for 15 years or more.
For a community of people whose hobby is authoring encyclopedia articles, the tone of discourse is sometimes surprisingly acrimonious. The two most edited Wikipedia pages of all time are a page to report vandalism and a noticeboard for "urgent incidents and chronic, intractable behavioral problems". Incivility is an acknowledged problem, but the community often lacks the appetite to punish longstanding and productive editors except in the most egregious of cases.
Underlying the rancor is the reality that editing Wikipedia is thankless work. Most edit pseudonymously. Conditions are often hostile. To be sure, vandalism, once a plague, is now a manageable problem; far more damaging are the well-intentioned but inept, and the doggedly tendentious. Someone might spend a dozen hours researching and writing an article, but in the eyes of the Wikipedia guidelines they have no stronger claim to the article than a drive-by editor who makes one change and never returns. The default posture that many seasoned editors adopt, of defensiveness verging on outright hostility, is a natural reaction to these circumstances.
I started editing Wikipedia 16 years ago. Long experience has bred a certain degree of cynicism. But I remain in continued awe of what is without question a supreme achievement of human collaboration, and grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in it. ∎