In a message dated 5/22/2011 9:31:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time, fredbaud@fairpoint.net writes:
Legally, Wikipedia is private property belonging to a nonprofit corporation. If the United States government, or some other government, owned it and regulated it in such a way as to guarantee public access it would be a public website.
My point Fred, is there is no such animal. So calling something a "private website" is redundant, since all websites are private, there are no public websites. Certainly there are websites owned by governments, but they are not public in the sense above that there is guaranteed access to *modify* their contents.
There are public spaces which are enforced, for example, freedom of religion or of the press in the United States. But you are correct that words alone fail; such guarantees must be enforced by citizens with a commitment to them. But that is not fundamentally different from how Wikipedia, or any voluntary organization, works.
Fred