One thought: wikipedias most important resource isn't content or servers or the software — it is people. This idea is probably hard to imagine for a writer of

One thought: wikipedias most important resource isn't content or servers or the software — it is people. This idea is probably hard to imagine for a writer of the telegraph, but wikipedia has a social space of contributers that it needs to manage in order to reach their goal of becoming a better encyclopedia. So in order to understand wikipedia lets think about how we could make it worse. A good encyclopedia has relevant content that represents the reality of the world it is written in. Now historically the best way to stray from reality has been to rely on writers who have an uniform background in regards to geography, economics, gender, race and so on. Naturally everybody has gaps in their perception, everybody has misperceptions or cliches in their mind — unavoidable. If you however want them to end up in an encyclopedia you need to make sure those writing and editing all have the same gaps and misperceptions so they never get challenged. That means diversity in writers and editors is a means to make it less likely their gaps and misconceptions align. So a certain degree of "social justice" is probably necessary for an encyclopedia if it wants to maintain a broad set of people, otherwise we would have social injustice, or the rule of the strongest and the strongest isn't automatically factually correct. But that would make sense, wouldn't it.