Introducing Wikipedia in the year 2019 to a wider audience is no longer needed. The website has reached the top10 of the Alexa statistics and can be called a success. Similar to encyclopedic projects in the 18th century, Wikipedia has adopted the latest technology and tries to enlighten the society.
Around the Wikipedia project there is a major concern, which is located not in the content itself, but in the documentation what Wikipedia is about and how to contribute to the project. The problem is, that many help pages are created and additionally in the academic literature a large amount of papers about the Wikipedia were written. It seems, that even for bibliographic experts, it's hard to explain what Wikipedia is and in which direction the project will evolve in the future.
The literature about Wikipedia can be divided into two groups. The beginning was dominated by papers about the project itself, and it's comparison to existing encyclopedia projects like Britannica. SInce 2010 a new sort of papers was written which is focussed on the conflicts in the project. Introducing this sort of text needs a detailed explanation.
In general, there are two options available to describe a project. The first idea is to assume, that Wikipedia is a blackbox which can be communicated to the outside world. The second idea is, to describe Wikipedia as a living system which is powered by internal conflicts. A typical example for a conflict is an edit war, banning a user from the project or deleting an article. The interesting fact is, that smaller wikis which are created by a single admin, doesn't have these sorts of conflicts. In a single user Wiki, the only possible conflict is available between the human user, and the mediawiki installation. For example, the user tries to format a heading in bold, but the syntax parser produces an error.
In the Wikipedia project are more complicated sort of conflicts is visible, which has to do with interaction users which are trying to achieve different goals. The most obvious conflict is between a user who likes to enter new information into the Wiki and the admin, who likes to prevent this, because he classifies the edit as vandalism. The amount of conflicts in the WIkipedia isn't researched very well. In the early literature, the assumption was, that conflicts can be ignored. From a game theoretic perspective, it make sense to monitor the conflicts in detail, because they are the explaining what the rules in the system are.
It's important to know, that Wikipedia is working different then it was described in the help section. That means, the rules of the Wikipedia game are not described explicit but they are communicated in the conflicts which break out and which are solved in a certain fashion. Describing these conflicts allows to identify the shared goals of the users and under which cases a stress from the outside is available.
How exactly are conflicts solved in the Wikipedia? The answer is, that the users in the system are anticipating the reaction of the community and this allows them to adapt their individual behavior. That means, a conflict is located on the time scale and it produces reactions in the future. In most cases, the prediction of future behavior is based on looking backwards in the past. Longterm admin users have a large knowledge what the workflow was for certain article conflicts. This pattern is used to generate a certain behavior in the now. A behavior consists of entering text and pressing delete buttons.
Creating a Wikipedia article
... from scratch doesn't make much sense. Because the user has no idea, which topic is important nor how to format the paragraph so that Wikipedia is happy too. The more elaborated way in creating content for Wikipedia is to search for text already written on the own home directory. In the best case, it's draft for an upcoming wikipedia article, written 2 months ago, but never uploaded to the encyclopedia. Such a draft version can be extended with two literature references, and after proofreading it's ready for the sandbox. This tool allows to check if the paragraph is well formatted, and then it can be copied into the article space.
The newbie would assume, that after uploading new content to the Wikipedia, an edit war will start in which a powerful admin collective will go through every referenced source and will ask if the user is already familiar with the topic. Such a scenario is available for mainstream articles which have a high pageview statistics, but the edit in normal scientific article in the encyclopedia is mostly ignored. That means, the content is uploaded and nothing will happen. If the edit looks not as maximum spam, but seems to look halfway informed, the edit will be accepted as valid. The reason is, that most articles in the Wikipedia doesn't have any contributors at all. That means, the last substantial edit was made 2 years ago, and if someone likes to add a small paragraph Wikipedia won't reject it.
Sure, it's important to write accurate sentences and provide quality ressources in the footnote section, but in general the quality standard is only on the average level.