A couple of generations ago, Marshall McLuhan observed that "the medium is the message".

Behind the mainspace articles at Wikipedia there is the medium of the process in the talk pages, in the policy pages, and in the noticeboard pages.

To my mind, the product is less significant than the process. After all, Wikipedia is hardly the only source of encyclopedic information. But it's one of the best sources of the otherwise hidden processes.

The process is a political one, often erratic, at times contentious and corrosive. For some of us, the process is disappointing, dispiriting, and alienating.

But the saddest part of all is that the manifest dysfunctionality also appears to be hopelessly irremediable.

Moulton mentions several themes that I've mentioned several times myself. Analyzing system dysfunctionalities is one of the things that systems analyzers, designers, engineers, modelers, and theoreticians are supposed to do, so maybe that would be a good thing to think about under this heading.

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but
    the rim of the farther systems.

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, p. 81
— Cf. Jon Awbrey, "Differential Logic and Dynamic Systems"

If the manifest dysfunctionality is hopelessly irremediable, then about all I can imagine to do with the lamentable situation is to artlessly croon about it in poignantly vogonic Dithyrambic Vexameter.

To my mind, what went wrong is that the current generation of Homo Schleppians once again reprised Humanity's Oldest Logic Error (HOLE) in the process of trying to craft a workable regulatory system.

So, the Powers that Pee have a HOLE in their head.

What else is new under the glum?

I have another theory.

Cool.

Let's array our respective theories side by side and see if we can NP:Synthesize a functional model of Wikipedia's Woeful Waywardness.

That is an interest quote. I don't believe that science could have known at that time that what Whitman said was true, or was astronomy more advanced at that time than I thought?