Much of the fire, as opposed to the light, that eminates from Wik concerns editing disputes which do not affect the content of an article, being over such questions as whether Vietnam is in Southeast Asia or in East Asia, or whether Mongolia is in Central Asia or in East Asia, etc. So no matter whether Wik "wins" or not, and he does usually win as he never gives up or wastes time talking with other users about disputes, the article itself is basically unaffected.
He does affect Wikipedia as he serves for others as a model of how to impose your will and get your way. He will also (eventually) serve as an example of what happens if you continually buck the minimum requests Wikipedia makes of users in the way of etiquette.
Fred
From: Delirium delirium@hackish.org Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 19:47:58 -0700 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] the wik user
The structural change is something that occasionally gets proposed but hasn't been detailed to anyone's satisfaction yet. The main issue is how we can make things less "fragile" without also losing the characteristic "anyone can edit any page" nature of Wikipedia. Personally, I wouldn't be against losing some of that for more-established pages---once an article has been hashed out over a period of a year or two by hundreds of people, the ability for anyone to change anything seems to do more harm than good. In fact, most major edits to something like, say, [[Israel]] will be reverted anyway unless there is plenty of talk-page discussion about each point first, so maybe it wouldn't hurt to make this restriction more technically-based.