While it is know for being a restrictive culture, I suspect most of it is because the people making the decision is visible. If we compare the difficulty of get

While it is know for being a restrictive culture, I suspect most of it is because the people making the decision is visible. If we compare the difficulty of getting an article accepted on Wikipedia with submitting an article here on HN and getting people to discuss it and making it visible on the first page, the later only has an invisible visibility score of upvotes and flags. If an article on HN get killed or buried you don't know why or who the people were that made the collective decision. On wikipedia the people responsible for the decision is right there, and it feel much more personal getting rejected by a person rather than by an invisible score. And yet, I would definitively claim that getting something accept on Wikipedia is much easier than getting something accepted by the HN community. So I am not sure that the guards of wikipedia is that bad. A lot of information does not make it past the guards, but it is also something which communities desire. If you don't have moderators you have upvote system. If you don't have upvote system you have algorithmic models of suggestions and recommendations. If you don't have that you have a search function that order by some kind of ranking.