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Concerned that excessive bureaucratization might stifle creativity and hamper growth, the early “Wikipedians” adopted a “people first, rules later” philosophy. But as the community expanded and conflicts multiplied, rules and guidelines piled up. By 2006 they constituted one fourth of the site and were one of its fastest-growing areas. Moreover, the ad-hoc rules were often flawed, sometimes even contradictory. Lih points to the dispute over the name of Gdańsk, a Polish city whose “German name (and former official appellation)” is Danzig. Gdańsk /Danzig was the subject of a heated editing war between pro-German and pro-Polish factions. After nearly two years and more than 8000 words of debate, the community settled on a fix that historians had already figured out: use “Danzig” for years between 1308 and 1945 and “Gdańsk” before 1308 and after 1945.
One solution to this disagreement (and many others) would have been to multiply entries: why not have a Gdańsk entry and a Danzig entry? There are, after all, enough electrons to go around. Something like the alternative idea developed at the now-defunct GNE (a recursive acronym for “GNE’s Not an Encyclopedia”—an inside joke in programming circles), which was a collection of unedited articles, “a library of opinions, an attempt to build a comprehensive documentation of all human thought,” with editing itself identified as a source of bias. Wikipedia decided early on to reject this split-the-difference approach. Having a neutral point of view required having a point of view, and the salutary policy was to push contributors to agree on a common statement.
Still, the initial spirit was largely anarchic, which was bound to cause some troubles, as when sensitive celebrities and VIPs discovered errors in their biographies. Wales became a contact point for all high-profile complaints and often stepped in to address them. The German edition of Wikipedia found an elegant solution to this problem by introducing so-called “flagged revisions” of articles. Anonymous users—the majority of visitors to the site—would see an approved (“flagged”) version of the article rather than the latest version. In August 2009 the English edition of Wikipedia announced that it would be adopting the flagged revisions policy for some articles.