Nicholas Carr's follow-up to The death of Wikipedia, where he questions the lack of true openness brought on by vandalism and libelers: Now, let's bury the myth:

Now that we have (haven't we?) come to accept the death of the True Wikipedia - even if the True Wikipedia only ever existed in our fantasies - maybe we can move on to bury, once and for all, the great Wikipedia myth.

The myth begins with the idea of radical openness, the idea that Wikipedia is a creation of the great mass of humanity in all its hairy glory. It's a myth encapsulated in Wikipedia's description of itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." As we now know, that's never been precisely true. According to cofounder Jimmy Wales, there have always been filtering mechanisms to restrict certain people's ability to edit certain articles. Those mechanisms have been expanded and tightened over time. In Wikipedia's early days, the encyclopedia asked contributors to maintain a "neutral point of view," but, as the official history of Wikipedia notes, "There were otherwise few rules initially." Since then, rules have proliferated, as the encyclopedia has adopted a de facto bureaucratic structure.