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Wikipedia is the worst way to try and write an encyclopedia. Seriously. Anyone who's worked with people before knows that if you get five people in a room together, you'll end up with six intractable opinions and at least one shouting match.
But, despite (or perhaps because of) human nature, Wikipedia has grown to be one of the largest sites on the internet, and has entered into the national consciousness as the place to go to check up on some random bit of information.
This isn't so much an essay as a collection of observations of Wikipedia process and culture; there are no solutions here to whatever problems Wikipedia might have.
"In The Large"
Wikipedia is, oddly enough, mostly correct. It's a byproduct of its self-selecting editors and the system: whenever someone finds an error, even if they don't fix it themselves, it's more than likely that they'll complain about it to someone who will. So, while there are always going to be errors (whether introduced mistakenly or intentionally), the system is always right behind, constantly trying to halt the ever-flowing tide of crap.
The Cabal
Admins are great. And I'm not just saying that because I am one. I haven't edited Wikipedia with any great care for over a year, but just can't walk away completely. But admins take it upon themselves to try and police the chaos that Wikipedia (might) devolve into without them. It's often a question of exclusion rather than inclusion. Wikipedia is constantly undergoing a glut of article creation, only a quarter of which, by my estimation, are valid articles. The rest fall to the waiting, hungry maw of process: Speedy Deletion, Prods, and Articles for Deletion, where the lines of "notability" and "importance" are constantly being redrawn. For example, in early 2006, articles on individual High Schools in America were hotly debated. The edge cases were the first to grab a permanent foothold; Stuyvesant, for example, was an early victory for the High School boosters. By the start of 2007, High Schools had gone from being deleted to fully accepted as notable, important, and appropriate for Wikipedia.
Bureaucracy
Like it or not, as Wikipedia grows, the amount of bureaucracy involved with doing anything increases. It started with the founding of the Arbitration Committee: a good idea, in theory, to take some load off of Jimbo for every time a dispute got out of hand that the admins couldn't deal with it. It has its own exacting process that, while slow, works most of the time. Arbcom, in a quest to try and stem the flow of complaints that was overwhelming the committee, supported the creation of Mediation, an intermediate step before full Arbitration. Mediation involves finding an uninvolved third party to try and get both sides of a dispute to agree on whatever issue the argument involves; in contrast to Arbcom, Mediator's decisions are non-binding. If it can't be resolved, Arbcom normally steps in.