I urge you to read 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness', which I find myself recommending here every few months:
I have read that, and it is thought provoking, and extremely appropriate for Wikipedia.
Precis: Human form hierarchies naturally.
I think a lot of the world's problems boil down to the fact that humans don't work quite right. We're built for the world of African savannah, not traveling to the moon or administering an information superhighway. There's still a few bugs in the system, but I wouldn't worry-- the planet will probably be releasing a major bugfix in a century or two.
If you try to suppress hierarchies from public view, they'll form out of your sight
A most timely observation, given the recent mailing list bruhaha. --
To come back to the task at hand-- I always wonder what wikipedia would look like if we had the right-to-fork at the article-level instead of the project level. Multiple versions of articles, some neutral, some argumentative, some simple, some complex, some verified, some speculative. Having "one official Wikipedia" article, sorta scares me-- the beauty of the internet is that you don't get just ONE of anything, you get the ALL.
Having other wikis out there is, of course, a safeguard-- if our "one" page becomes habitually not the best, people will instantly just go elsewhere. But it would be cool if could if we could somehow incorporate that sort of safeguard right into the Wikipedia system.
On the other hand, n different forks of the article would mean 1/n editors per article, so it's not as if our current system doesn't seem to be working extremely well.
Alec