I'd contrast this situation to Wikipedia, which allows unfettered access to collaboration. The benefit of MediaWiki is that people can build their changes dire

I'd contrast this situation to Wikipedia, which allows unfettered access to collaboration. The benefit of MediaWiki is that people can build their changes directly on previous changes, being continually pulled into master. Alternatively, Wikipedia suffers from authorities having less weight than experienced editors with little domain knowledge (and constant fights against vandalism, esp. on trending articles). There is a likely a middle-ground between Wikipedia's open editing, and GitHub's "what does it really mean to fork a story and make a pull request." Interesting experiment none-the-less for Wired.