From Clay Shirky’s Many-to-Many: Wikipedia: The nature of authority, and a LazyWeb request…:
Wikipedia is not a product, it is a system. The collection of mass intelligence that I value unfolds over time, necessarily. Like democracy, it is messier than planned systems at any given point in time, but it is not just self-healing, it is self-improving. Any given version of Britannica gets worse over time, as it gets stale. The Wikipedia, by contrast, whose version is always the Wiki Now, gets better over time as it gets refreshed. This improvement is not monotonic, but it is steady.