I was surprised that Wikipedia wasn't immediately overrun by trolls, griefers, and spammers. I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that, though I've got some speculations.

Unlike most user contributed sites it's happy to throw stuff away. It does grow but it doesn't care about growing fast. That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate.

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idle_zealot 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate

One important piece of even trying to replicate that is its nature as a nonprofit. Any profit-seeking organization trying to grow a user-contribution based site will prefer content and moderation pipelines that drive engagement over quality.

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rafram 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because contributions from new users are immediately reviewed by legions of volunteer cops who are eager to revert vandalism, and most wannabe vandals don’t have the sense to make a couple legitimate edits before vandalizing.

	▲	jfengel 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Can you imagine any other crowdsourced site who was willing to subject new users to so much scrutiny, and err on the side of deleting contributions? Certainly that's not a great way to make money. Not if you're depending on people to spend a lot of time seeking new content (and be shown ads).

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zahlman 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that

It really doesn't. Granted, it could be a lot worse.