Law professor Eric Goldman loves Wikipedia, but he's also convinced that the site contains the "seeds of its own destruction." In other words, not to put too fine a point upon it, Wikipedia will fail.

Goldman made his provocative point at the Silicon Flatirons conference this weekend in Boulder, Colorado, standing at a heavy wooden podium in a multiuse room that had been donated to the University of Colorado by a graduating class back in the 1960s. Those students could not have foreseen Wikipedia at the time, but by 2008, everyone gathered in that room—from corporate vice presidents to think tank bosses to academics—had made use of the collaborative online encyclopedia.

In Goldman's view, the very popularity of the site stands in tension with its goal of radical openness. The freely editable nature of Wikipedia has made it a canvas upon which vandals, spammers, and pranksters can paint at will.

Case in point: the bizarre recent news about Germany's new economic affairs minister, whose full name is Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. As noted Wednesday on Slashdot, some Wikipedian inserted a "Wilhelm" somewhere in the dizzying list of names; the extra "Wilhelm" was picked up in reputable German publications (whose staffers are clearly not above using Wikipedia to check their facts); the Wikipedia page then linked to the articles in question as evidence that "Wilhelm" was an actual component of Freiherr zu Guttenberg's name.

Policing such changes can take a great deal of volunteer energy, most of it contributed by a few thousand hardcore editors. But Wikipedia becomes an ever-juicier target as it expands, and Goldman believes the encyclopedia must choose between being high-quality or freely editable; it can't have both. Unfortunately, both approaches have their own problems.

No good option

But Wikipedia becomes an ever-juicier target as it expands, and Goldman believes the encyclopedia must choose between being high-quality or freely editable; it can't have both. Unfortunately, both approaches have their own problems.

For instance, to keep the site freely editable, Wikipedia will need to replace its stock of hardcore admins and editors as they retire or quit. But Goldman thinks this will be a problem, since many of these editors first started their work when Wikipedia was a quite different place. Now, the editors themselves discourage the contributions of others through "xenophobia" toward outsiders; Goldman believes that they see "threats" everywhere and points out that the greater part of all edits made to the site are actually reverted by these editors.

In addition, plenty of political jockeying takes place among editors. And editors have few incentives for their work—no way to make money, no real way even to earn attribution. Together, these problems mean that as editors get burned out by patrolling for spam and vandalism, fewer new people will be interested in stepping up to plug the gap.

The result: a death spiral among the editorial community.

Wikipedia could also move in the other direction, making it more difficult to edit (at least some) articles on the site. Jimbo Wales has been a big backer of moving to "flagged revisions," for instance, and the site already has limited features to "protect" controversial articles. But this is also tricky, because it will raise the bar for both spammers and for new members. This discourages new contributors to Wikipedia and also makes it more likely that current site editors will cease their voluntary labor—some will decide that "this isn't what we signed up for" when they started work on the crowdsourced project.

"I think Wikipedia is great," Goldman said when wrapping up his talk, and he wants to see it succeed, but he has trouble seeing how that can happen as the project continues to grow.