Is it just me, or does Carr need a good editor?
"And so, having gone on for so long, I at long last come to my point."
Um, couldn't he have just trimmed his article, a teensy bit? All that nonsense about quasi-religious longing, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, gets in the way of what he's really saying, which is that new groupware ventures like Wikipedia, whatever else they may be, aren't engines for transforming the work of masses of ordinary people into great writing.
Honestly if I'd been faced with a choice between thoroughly copy editing Jane Fonda, and reading one of Carr's articles all the way through just once, I'd go for Jane every time. He could have said it all in three paragraphs. But I suppose that if you remove the references to mysticism and evangelism you get down to an observation that's so commonplace that it can only provoke the response: "so what?"