[hollerith]

>It'd be easy to criticize Wikipedia for having that culture, except that the project is so spectacularly successful.

My recollection is that it started being spectacularly successful within a year or 2 of its founding (in 2001) but that the profusion of rules (and deletionism) started to ramp up slowly (over a period of many years) after it started being spectacularly successful.

(The Wikimedia Foundation was incorporated on June 20, 2003. The Foundation was granted section 501(c)(3) status by the U.S. Internal Revenue Code as a public charity in 2005.)