"Wikipedia may be the largest collaborative initiative in history and influences what people the world over know or think they know. Its distinctive feature is the nonexpert, nonprofessional, noncertified, nonformal production of knowledge with credible content. Academics like to sneer at those characteristics, even as more and more of us acknowledge Wikipedia, support it, and use it in teaching. And why should we not warm to it? The rules of Wikipedia discourse are modeled after an ideal academy's. Arguments, not personal attacks or status, carry the day . ... Why, then, does Wikipedia work? In theory, it should not. In practice, it seems to be a new paradigm of organization, whose breezy anticredentialism tosses traditional hierarchies of knowledge production to the wind ."
"Thanks to a vibrant community united by a few core principles, plus detailed policies and safeguards against trolls and vandalism , Wikipedia has already become a piece of the knowledge ecosystem . Like science , its aim is to propose a synthesis of existing knowledge and conflicting interpretations of reality . ... The main criticism against Wikipedia is that it is a free-for-all domain without any professional standards. Yet even if Wikipedia has to be used with caution, it is not a free-for-all . On the contrary, the Wikipedia community has developed a consistent set of principles, rules, policies, and guidelines that have helped build consensus among a community of thousands of contributors (Jemielniak , 2014). ... Wikipedia encourages contributors to edit articles, and to reach consensus by engaging in discussion on the "talk page" in case of a disagreement. The process is typically Hegelian in nature: make an edit, then wait for the next change, and if there is opposition, seek a compromise. A variant of this policy is the BOLD, revert, discuss cycle : bold editing is openly encouraged in the policies, as it leads to discussion, which helps make articles better. This collaborative culture, which is unique to Wikipedia , makes the community a living organism , growing continuously, adapting to its environment and answering its critics."
