The culture wars are coming for the best utopian project of the early internet. Can it survive the informational anarchy that’s disrupted the rest of media?

By Alexis C. Madrigal @ TheAtlantic.com,  Aug. 7

The ever-widening maelstrom surrounding tweets by Sarah Jeong, the latest hire by the New York Times editorial board, may consume all the atoms in the known universe, and as Wikipedia is of this world, it, too, must be a place to immortalize (or attempt to immortalize) Jeong as racist. [...] After her hiring, these tweets were picked up by right-wing media as proof of her “racism.” The battle over including these tweets in her Wikipedia bio has been the subject of a brutal edit war, which is like a grim national-politics-level recapitulation of the old, funny Wikipedia wars about cow-tipping, hummus, and Nikola Tesla.

Wikipedia’s internal rules guide debates about what content belongs in articles, and how events can be described. These rules are arcane and quite specific to Wikipedia. For example, Wikipedians maintain that they must maintain an NPOV, or Neutral Point of View. They value certain sources over others. They try to stay away from “presentism.” They’ve tried to create objective standards (of importance, say) for including facts about people [....]