Virginia Postrel has long been interested in Wikipedia’s status as a self-regulating system—and all the genius and tensions inherent therein. “I think you can have order without design,” she says. But the volunteer-engineered encyclopedia has also become a bit crabbed and sclerotic in middle age, with longtime volunteer editors sometimes fencing out the input of vandals and experts alike, as Postrel describes in her piece, “Crowd Control.” The former editor of Reason magazine, Postrel is the author, most recently, of The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. She is also a regular columnist for Bloomberg View.
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