As a note at the end of the article points out, Andrew Lih, the author of the article kindly submitted here, is someone who literally wrote the book about Wikipedia, namely the book The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.[1] His book is one of the books I read as I transitioned from being a reader of Wikipedia to being an editor of Wikipedia in 2010.

I think the best point he made in the current article needs more emphasis in the article, and more discussion here on Hacker News. "The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes — the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in." Big time. The governance on Wikipedia is basically a mobocracy, and it is not producing good improvements to articles.

Contrary to what several comments posted earlier in this thread (while I was examining my Wikipedia watchlist) say, I don't think much of Wikipedia is very good at all yet. There was the famous study that suggested that Wikipedia was no worse (based on a sampling of articles in the study) than the Encyclopedia Britannica at that time, and plainly a typical Wikipedia article is better than a typical single-author website on the same topic somewhere on the Internet, but Wikipedia is actually a LOT worse than the content of other reference books college-educated people can find by consulting an academic library. Wikipedia currently wins reader attention because of the extreme convenience of doing ill-formed Google searches on the Internet as a whole and then examining whatever Wikipedia articles show up highest in the search results. Yes, that is a contribution to the quality of freely available online information. But remarkably few of the 5,000 most viewed articles on Wikipedia each week[2] are even up to "B class" on Wikipedia's very generous quality rating scale, and "good article" or "featured article" quality articles on highly viewed topics are even rarer.

I work at improving some of the high-page-view articles. Two of the 5,000 articles on the weekly top 5,000 list (they are there every week without fail) that are at "good article" quality level are articles that I helped improve. But the petty edit warring and endless wikilawyering about silly issues, often solely in the interest of pushing fringe points of view, has ruined a lot of Wikipedia's articles and has driven away many productive editors who are disgusted by all that interpersonal drama with unaccountable strangers.

What I would like to see tried is a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize, with careful work done on prize criteria and funding for a substantial prize by a philanthropist, to see if there is a better way to organize a crowd-sourced project to build a free, online encyclopedia, both as to software base and as to organizational structure. I suspect that there are two or three models of a new encyclopedia that could force Wikipedia to change or be left in the dust. Elon Musk could really make himself famous by trying to fund a prize like this, but he is by far not the only Silicon Valley entrepreneur who could afford to fund a meaningful prize in this space.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Wikipedia-Revolution-Nobodies-Ency...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pag...