J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
As the Wikipedia becomes more and more widely known, you're just going to have a higher and higher probability of including in that group some of the many humans who are losers. And, as the aftermath of Cantor and Siegel proved, that effect gets worse, not better, as the community grows.
Rejoice because your pessimism is unfounded in fact; I've seen over the past year and a half that the percentage of bad edits has not increased (although the volume has, of course) and, IMO, has in fact decreased. This is simply due to the fact that for every jerk there are many scores of good people (perhaps hundreds) and therefore increasing the number of people reading and contributing to Wikipedia only makes it better, not worse.
I had a similar pessimistic opinion, BTW, back when I could review an entire days edits in two hours (there were only 600-800 edits a day back then!).
But Wikipedia has scaled really well to my total astonishment.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)