This mirrors my own experience on Wiki, which dragged on for months after admins were caught removing content for internal political purposes and alienating ten

This mirrors my own experience on Wiki, which dragged on for months after admins were caught removing content for internal political purposes and alienating tens of thousands (according to objective metric) who used those pages. Conflict resolution there is centered almost entirely on people-drama and almost never on content or _anything_ of substance which is rather the point of an encyclopedia. This is plainly evident from reading any of their notice/resolution boards which are often little but favor-currying. Wiki-lawyering (citing policies in purposefully cryptic and usually erroneous ways) is rampant, and all these problems exists because admins aren't appointed due to domain expertise (or any sort of expertise for that matter) but being in the good graces of other admins. This conflicts with most wiki content editors, who are often domain experts rather than bureaucrats/politicians. I ended up being banned for doing a reasonably popular reddit AMA about all this, and apparently violating the rule to never talk about wiki administrating outside of wiki. In sum, the system only works because talented and intelligent people want to create encyclopedic material, and there generally aren't enough admins to stymy this.