Skyring wrote
Somewhere along the way, Wikipedia seems to have lost something
valuable. I look at this list and just about everything I see is one group of editors bickering with another group.
We gained ... an encyclopedia: 500000 articles in March, 10% added smoothly since then.
Nobody should kid themselves that there was ever a golden time when there was no 'bickering'. If you look at the traffic numbers you see huge growth. Every month or so an asocial user kicking up a fuss about the way things are handled... it's the price we pay for being a radically open community. Remember, this is a big volunteer project; all that happens is that some people simply make it too hard for them to be accepted as volunteers.
Charles