Lots of problems

Lots of problems; all recognized, many times, by others:

1. Administrators think they are better than everyone else (you ever hear an admin apologize?). But most of them are just unemployed people with lots of time on their hands.
   
2. With today's tools, even a moron can make a huge number of edits each day. Problem is, the morons do exactly that.
3. The mass of editors are unsophisticated, unable to understand that the worldview they and their friends hold is pretty much limited to newspaper readers in Anglo-America.
   
4. The policy on sources is absurd: journalists are considered good sources, but they use much lower quality sources than what would be accepted on WP. As if the average journalist is a good filter for information quality!
5. The average editor thinks of WP as a mass of weeds that needs to be hacked, not as a garden that should be grown.

This last one seems especially important. When WP first started out, the emphasis was on creating content. Over time, lots of content appeared, and problems with some of that content became obvious (some was created by self-interested editors, some was not really notable, etc.). As new editors came in, they were not confronted with a wonderful blank space to be filled, but with an enormous mass of articles that--according to prevailing wisdom--contained problems. So, as is only natural, they approached WP with an attitude entirely disrespectful of the work that had been done by the first wave of editors. This second wave of editors might perform a valuable role, but I doubt it--a critical attitude is only legitimately adopted by superior people, and the second wave does not appear to be superior in any important way to the first.

Speeding up

There's been a bit of discussion lately about why so many editors are leaving the project. Here's one possible reason: the editing tools have become too powerful. Many of the more inferior editors appear to pride themselves on the number of edits they make, and these powerful tools allow them to vastly increase their rate of "productivity." What kind of quality can one expect from an editor who dashes madly about, making hundreds of edits a day? What kind of edit can one expect from an editor who is just spending seconds on each "contribution"? Mostly what one sees are reverts or deletions, since adding content takes a fair amount of time.

By and large, deletionists don't write articles--their primary activity is to delete the work of other people, and they do this not out of principle, but simply because this is the fastest way they can increase their edit count. Deletion is not in itself bad, but it is bad when done without sufficient thought. In most cases, thinking over a bad piece of text will enable an editor to rewrite it. WP's improvement requires thoughtful rewriting, not frantic deletion.

It would be nice to see a change in attitude toward edit counts--if there were a bit of a stigma to generating hundreds of edits a day, the deletionists would become a much weaker force on WP.

It belongs to everyone

Wikipedia is a commons, the property of us all. It's like the city park that, as Jane Jacobs observed, because it belongs to everyone, belongs to no one. People who have nothing better to do drift into the park: the unemployed, the drunk, the homeless. Respectable people scurry quickly through, and because they don't feel a sense of ownership, they don't speak up and reprimand those who behave in antisocial ways.

Wikipedia is like that city park, in that anyone can show up, but most people have something better to do. Editors who spend all day long at Wikipedia, accumulating hundreds of edits a day, are fairly common. These cannot have jobs, cannot have families, cannot even have many dates. Try to visualize these editors and an image appears of a middle-aged guy living in his parents' garage.

Not a problem, except victory in Wikipedia always belongs to the most persistent. In a dispute, people with real responsibilities will state their case and then give up if it looks like a long struggle is ahead. People with a lot of time on their hands can thus often get their way, and can easily manage to become a real pest without actually falling afoul of the rules.

Academic Freedom

Most Wikipedia editors are clueless about academic freedom. Like the common run of folks, they believe that an academic should be busy producing insights that confirm what all of us already know. Their reaction to an academic whose work has unveiled uncomfortable truths is one of distaste, repulsion, condemnation. Perhaps the best example would be that of historians specializing in the late Ottoman Empire, historians such as Justin McCarthy. McCarthy, a demographer able to read the Ottoman archives, has examined changes in local populations during the last years of the empire, and has supplied substantive numbers to the claims and counterclaims of ethnic cleansing and massacres during that period. His conclusions are not to the taste of those who maintain that there was an "Armenian Genocide." How is McCarthy treated on Wikipedia? By being formally categorized as an "Armenian Genocide Denier." I'm not making this up, take a look.

The Ottoman historians are not alone. Hostile editors edit articles on other academics working on controversial issues. A good example is Richard Lynn, an IQ researcher who has become a leading expert on between-group IQ differences. His work is extremely politically incorrect, but its quality compares favorably with that of his more politically correct peers. A decent article on Lynn has eventually emerged on Wikipedia, but it took a long time, and lots of struggle.

A final example would be that of Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who spent his career examining cases of children who appear to remember details of past lives. His findings give mild support to the existence of reincarnation, a result not at all to the liking of skeptics, who are imbued with the unshakable faith that reincarnation can not possibly exist. Stevenson's article, as well as the related article on "reincarnation research", have been turned into pages where obscure journalists are cited to buttress claims that this research is "pseudo-science". Problem is, Stevenson's team has produced the only scientific work on reincarnation, so it boggles the imagination how those defenders of science--the skeptics--are able to announce that science disagrees with his findings.

In the long run, we are all dead

The Classical school of political economy holds the view that recessions are short-lived and self-correcting. When a recession occurs, some labor and capital falls idle. According to the Classicals, these idle factors of production react by accepting employment at a lower price; factor prices continue to fall until firms have willingly hired all "surplus" factors. Thus, unemployment (of capital and labor) automatically ends, through the mechanism of falling factor prices--a mechanism requiring no government intervention.
John Maynard Keynes famously disagreed with the Classical view, arguing that factor prices are "downwardly rigid"--they do fall when factors are idle, but reluctantly and slowly. "In the long run," Keynes acknowledged, falling factor prices would eliminate the recession, "but in the long run, we are all dead." In other words, the self-correcting mechanism works too slowly to be useful.
This is also the problem with the eventualist view of Wikipedia. Sure, given enough editors, articles will eventually evolve toward something fair and balanced, but the problem is that eventually can be a very long time. Too long to be useful.
Some parts of Wikipedia move towards excellence much faster than others. A sophisticated user of Wikipedia understands this, and has learned which parts are worthy of trust and which parts should best be avoided. The problem is that the average user of Wikipedia is not sophisticated--she is a high school student or college student, looking up a topic about which she knows next to nothing. That the topic may eventually have a good article is not much consolation to the student who is imbibing misinformation today. And it is certainly no consolation to her teacher, who will continue to ban Wikipedia as a legitimate source for research papers.