"The Paper of Record" is hardly the one place to get the gospel on anything, but when 4 NYT articles in 24 hours talk about customers, fans, and online contributors driving the direction of not just web sites, but franchises and products, then I'm comfortable saying leadership via consumer collaboration is on the radar in a new way.

Katie Hafner's article on gating access to some Wikipedia entries highlights the need for some level of process and hierarchy even in an open community. The inevitable need to close a small number of entries some of the time echoes my favorite PDF article ever, when Zephyr called for a "productive tension" between the hub of a campaign and its spokes.

Just because leadership needs to exercise some control, and even "crack down" from time to time, doesn't mean that wiki-generated knowledge is a utopian experiment that has been shown up by what Hafner refers to as "well-publicized problems with some entries." (I'm sorry, but I smell that same smirking schadenfreude in the Hafner article that MSM so often has about growing pains in Internet communities and movements. "Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy" nods the headline, like your mom when she cleans the scrape you got climbing that ill-advised tree.)

It's the opposite, in fact. The emergence of processes or restrictions that enable the system to adapt without failing is a sign that this new hub/spokes model of knowledge building is functional. I'm not a biologist or an economist, but I'm certain there are some basic principles about the need for homeostatic mechanisms in functional, complex systems.

And the emergence of four articles about versions of the same phenomenon on nearly the same day shows that the institutional structure of public knowledge is itself shifting and adapting to the pressures of an increasingly effective sphere of public knowledge managed not by institutions, but by consumer and audience communities.

The best written of the articles is Warren St. John's totally entertaining profile of Ze Frank's latest project (go Ze!). The piece captures the slapstick pressures that a system faces when the final filter for an entire community's ideas is one loyal, beleaguered webmaster/actor/producer/victim.

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