Have you ever come across a piece of writing that basically sums up your dissertation better than you could? I think I just did. Now, it would make more sense if this writing had come from my dissertation director, but what I found was written by someone I've never met and who (to my knowledge) has not clue that my dissertation even exists. And so I say "Thank you, Nat Torkington." While writing about a Wikipedia dust up regarding the "notability" of a hacker named "Why_the_lucky_stiff"(and the possible deletion of his Wikipedia article), Torkington's post at O'Reilly Radar did a fairly decent job of summing up Hospitable Texts. He didn't hit every point. But hey, nobody's perfect:

"Perhaps an analogy to another social process would help. Wikipedia is like an open source software project where the great unwashed submit patches, the committers choose which to apply, and the core team make executive decisions when needed. There's no piece of code that determines worthiness to be committed to the source tree. Instead, there are people with judgement and human flaws in the way. The Linux kernel shouldn't grow e-mail protocol stacks, web server hacks, and a built-in relational database just because someone submits the patches. The project's committers are there to keep the software project on track. So too with Wikipedia.

Hating the humans or even hating the filtering process is a waste of time and energy. The deletionists and the inclusionists both have a role to play. Wikipedia has a lot of things that it is not and the humans are there to keep the project on track. Those who want to delete and want to keep are doing their bit, just as others did by creating a page for _why in the first place.

The creators of any piece of social software must carefully choose where to punch holes in pure computational deterministic perfection to let human attributes like intelligence or taste shine through. Their choices define the project. This 'you want X, I want Y, we'll go back and forth citing Wikipedian principles and external sources until a decision emerges or must be made by an administrator' process isn't Wikipedia's weakness, or even its strength, it is Wikipedia."