[mhh__]

> It's broken on every conceivable level

And yet it's still really good.

People like Larry Sanger prattle on about how awful wikipedia is (and make multiple websites for collecting mistakes, which mostly seem to be blank), rarely with any concrete evidence. In fact Sanger in particular refuses to browse wikipedia at all - except that he does but through a proxy, because giving wikipedia.org traffic is "icky". I pointed out that this is childish behaviour and he blocked me, go figure.

[hombre_fatal]

As many problems as Wikipedia has, and it surely has them, it's amazing how useful it remains despite those problems, and it's the only thing we have like it.

Stack Overflow is similar: you can make it look pretty bad case by case, yet it's an unchallenged best of breed despite its warts.

Maybe there's no perfect way to run these massive operations just like there is no clean, pretty answer to "should this article exist?" no matter where you set the bar.