There are a range of topics that are always being disupted between inclusionists and deletionists. It's the borderline cases that are the hardest. A long-running battle has been about whether or not to have an article about each and every school that exists. Each college or university certainly deserves one, but what about each and every middle or ... See more

It is perhaps an interesting coincidence that the wiki page where new users are encouraged to experiment and "play" safely is called the Sandbox.... "sidewalks work because they permit local interactions to create global order... the information networks of sidewalk life are fine-grained enough to permit higher-level learning to emerge"

Wikipedia can allow anyone to edit because any action can be easily undone by anyone else in the community. Only in the digital realm is it easier to repair things than to do harm. If Alice incorrectly changes a fate, Bob can notice and change it back with the click of a button. If a vandal attempts to insert incorrect information en masse, other u... See more

Unlike most sites on the Internet that solicit "user generated content", no registration, no email, no identification is needed before someone can change a Wikipedia page. It would seem self-evident that this "open editing" model would lead to uncontrollable chaos and absolute disaster, yet completely counter to intuition, it has produced the oppos... See more

Unlike other encyclopedias throughout history, Wikipedia has no physical limit on how many pages it can contain.... also, in the age of Google search and hypertext, people can come across Wikipedia's content through any number of avenues... The idea of a volume or alphabetical order is completely irrelevant to a modern Internet encyclopedia. Althou... See more

Durova's fourth law: small organizations run on relationships. Formal policies emerge when the organization becomes too large to operate on that basis. Policies continue to grow in both quantity and complexity in proportion to organizational growth until the policies no longer work, at which point policies remain in place while the organization rev... See more

Eventualism has become an accepted norm in the community, because by default since the beginning of the project, starting from nothing, articles have overwhelmingly benefited from multiple eyeballs (and edits).

Wikipedia is a human centered endeavor that invites participation on a massive scale. It usurps top-down authority, empower individuals, and harnesses previously untapped labor of individuals previously isolated in separate social networks, but brought together by the Internet.

Since the Web 2.0 era is about user-generated content, it can be a show to newcomers who are not used to the idea when they come to Wikipedia. The community practice of not waiting for a fancy solution and just getting your hands dirty has spawned a special mantra (or admonishment): SOFIXIT.