Andrea,

To be blunt here, I think that you are quite naive about what really happens at Wikipedia. Perhaps you are just looking as an outsider who has never edited Wikipedia and never seen the internal processes in all of their glory. But the reality is that Wikipedia does not actually do what it says it is. It is not transparent at all, it is not working to fight vandals, and in no way is it achieving what you think it is. It is also a terrible reference.

Most web sites would require for you to identify who you are - Wikipedia doesn't. On Wikipedia you can edit without even creating an account, and if you do create one, you don't have to so much as submit your e-mail address, let alone making sure that it's one account per person, a valid e-mail address, or anything like that. On top of this, even administrators can't see your IP address - unless you don't have an account. The vast majority of the "vandalism" could be handled by Wikipedia simply having better checking procedures. Wikipedia could, in short, make improved security in their software and then they wouldn't need to do any of this. Do you really think that Wikipedia is being attacked en masse? Of course not. Some people have described it as a "game of cops and robbers". Wikipedia encourages vandalism, so that they can then say that they are needing to have all of these administrators, with all of this power.

But when you get in to the nitty gritty, a large amount of what we brush off as vandalism is not vandalism at all. It is in reality a form of censorship, that Wikipedia uses to silence criticism and to push their own agenda and change history. A number of viewpoints that are not popular amongst the Wikipedia heirarchy are quite simply squashed from the entire process, the people with the viewpoints banned and trashed and all evidence supporting their viewpoint destroyed and deleted. They even use something called a spam blacklist as part of this censorship, and frequently add sites that are not used for spam at all - just to push a particular point of view. At present, over 50% of the sites listed in the spam black list are actual reference sites.

Wikipedia does the same thing with critics. They do not deal with their critics properly, instead calling them "a bunch of banned users, trolls, and conspiracy theorists", and will make up any story that they can find to discredit them. If critics are not banned users already, they will soon be banned. Just look at how they have treated the recently created http://www.wikitruth.info/ site.

Wikipedia's processes in general suffer from a severe lack of transparency. A big part of this comes from their aim for the unattainable "Neutral Point of View", a policy created by Larry Sanger, the person who first had the idea to use Wikipedia as a "fun version of the more serious Nupedia", who has since been fired and is now considered to be a critic of Wikipedia. Neutral Point of View aims to get rid of all bias, or at least all "obvious bias" from an article, yet it fails to acknowledge that everyone has bias, for all but the most trivial and generally useless factual information, and that even the concept of removing "obvious" bias is biased in itself because it depends on what you think is obvious. The end result of this is that Wikipedia still has bias - its impossible to get rid of it (in spite of Sanger's claims that Wikipedia is just not enforcing it properly, its actually not possible). But Wikipedia hides this bias, and has a severe lack of transparency. The transparency problems are so bad that there is a group of mostly high ranking administrators who get together to push a point of view across the whole of Wikipedia, a group that is often called "the cabal". People get banned for going against them, this group can do what they want, and they always push what they believe is right, regardless of facts, evidence, or anything else.

Wikipedia has lack of transparency with their "CheckUser", something which on most sites all administrators would have, but on Wikipedia an ultra-secretive select group of users get and then won't tell anyone what they've actually proven. They have an Arbitation Committee, supposedly to uphold serious disputes, but in reality has no rules governing it and frequently will ban the person who has made a complaint, and their reasons are regularly farcical. And then of course the worst of them all is WP:OFFICE, which allows for Wikipedia to censor articles, and not even tell people what they've done or why, yet you can be permanently banned if you so much as talk about it. Then there is of course the spam blacklist. And of course the issue of deleted pages.

And if you think that Wikipedia is doing this purely for legal reasons, you are wrong. Wikipedia hates legalities so much that they have a policy to permanently ban anyone who makes a legal threat. Or even hints that perhaps someone else might have libelled them. Cases like Ashida Kim, Daniel Brandt, QuakeAid and Jack Sarfatti, were all libelled by Wikipedia, and continue to be libelled, yet because they told Wikipedia about it and tried to get them to stop, they were all banned and the smear made worse. Wikipedia indeed you could say has no interest in abiding by the law, and uses detailed ways of wriggling out of their legal responsibilities. The only reason why they actually abided by the law with regards to Seigenthaler was because it was mentioned in USA Today. Yet because the main media ignores the majority of their indiscretions, people like those listed above get their names smeared and can't do anything about it.

NPR shouldn't aim to become like Wikipedia. And you should aim to have a more balanced approach when talking about it. Wikipedia is a bad source to use. Look at their General Disclaimer, and you'll see that Wikipedia itself asserts no guarantee of accuracy on any article. It is not a good model.

Of course, "Encycloblog" or "Jimbo's Big Bag O' Trivia" is doing well. But "Wikipedia" is not.