This has topic-drifted like mad, so please excuse this as being a
collection of utterly unrelated material.
One of the things that has bothered me is the way in which Wikipedia
has tended to attempt to take over from more specialized efforts which
are surely more authoritative than anything we can produce. I've seen
this in a lot of science and transportation subjects, as (for
instance) the tendency to write articles on every train station that
ever existed, and then put in all information short of actual arrival
and departure times. This stuff is high maintenance and particularly
where there is an official site, any sensible person should prefer
that over us. It would be nice to come up with some way to turn
ourselves into a portal to the good (meaning reliable) stuff for these
subjects.
As far as AGF is concerned: someone way up the chain hit the main
reason. In decades of on-line discussion, I've found no principle more
destructive than the "sovereign right to take offense". Even true
trolling is not as bad (and it seems to me that most of what is called
"trolling" these days is actually the SRtTO). In order to for you to
make rational discussion, it is necessary for you to view your
opponent as someone you could discuss things with rationally.
The flip side is that the visibility of Wikipedia means that there are
way too many people who have something (malign) to gain from gaming
it. The obvious result is that bad faith is increasingly abundant; the
less obvious result is that the resulting urge to conduct a crusade
against bad faith leads people to self-righteous responses. There are
a lot of subjects which one probably shouldn't edit over long periods,
because the POV warring is so strong that it is eventually possible
not to be contaminated by it.
Which leads me to something that will undoubtedly rub some people the
wrong way. Wikiprojects attract people who love the subject in
question. This is always a recipe for some bias, as (for example)
people in the Trains Wikiproject are likely to have positive leanings
towards trains, and perhaps especially the trains of their native
land/region/railroad. I don't know how much we can do about that, as
banning projects or other overt associations isn't going to stop
people from associating. The ones that worry me are those that are
formed around advocacy points, and especially those addressing current
controversies. For instance, one can go to the Intelligent Design
project page and see complaints that it (and therefore the articles
under its sway) are owned by committed secular Darwinists. We also
have project on LGBT studies and on animal rights which surely must
function as rallying points for those who support the same. Argument
about how accurate these perceptions are is a bit beside the point; if
the projects themselves are free of bias, there are surely
subcommunities of editors who aren't.
I don't have a nice summary to tie all this together, so I'll just top here.