QUOTE(Somey @ Thu 5th November 2009, 1:30pm)
I realize that's not a wiki-specific concern, but if you ask me, Wikipedia's near-dominance in that regard only makes things easier for those wishing to establish centralized control, if not get rid of the whole thing.
Among my librarian friends (yes, I have a few), there is much concern about government control over libraries and what is in them. There have been any number of incidents in the United States where the government has published something in some obscure government publication, only to come around after 9/11 to every library with a quasi- (which is to say non-) judicial order to
literally tear those pages out of the relevant book.
Similarly, there are big companies who have and continue to go to great lengths to suppress information about them, including buying all extant copies of some publication to do so.
The librarians, as you might expect, think that the control over this is lots and lots and lots of dissemination of copies of relevant information to libraries, public, private, and otherwise, around the world. The principle has been embodied in an electronic project:
LOCKSS: Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. The LOCKSS system allows for distribution of (e.g.) digital journals among the holders of those journals, and provides mechanisms for reliable and secure retrieval of original copies when a "corrupted" copy is detected. Of central issue is the question of what constitutes "corruption" and the technology of the system is heavily weighted toward secure on-line "voting" (it's between systems, not people) about the correctness of specific digital copies.
Wikipedia has many problem with its policies, content, and internal political structure, but one that we don't talk about much is the utter
centralization of it. English-language Wikipedia -- a "document" that has gotten people arrested and detained at airports, perhaps caused suicides, and serves as a vehicles for propaganda from all sides of innumerable political and social conflicts -- is prone to what engineers call a "single point failure" at many, many levels, and thus prone to single point control. While it was arguably used for "good", the suppression earlier this year of news of the kidnapping of
New York Times journalist Stephan Farrell shows how easy it is for a very small cluster of individuals to control what Wikipedia says on virtually any topic.
Lots of copies keep stuff safe. One copy, located in Jimbo's garage in Florida, is the antithesis of that(*).
(*) Don't bother telling me that it is really in a big data center and it's all backed up on some server in Copenhagen. For purposes of control, it's entirely centralized.