However, this discussion has caused me to reread The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and I found a section in it which summarizes exactly what I was trying to say in my original article (which was much more thought out than these blog comments have been):

“Insight comes from individuals. The most their surrounding social machinery can ever hope to do is to be responsive to breakthrough insights—to nourish and reward and rigorously test them instead of squashing them.

Some will characterize this as a romantic view, a reversion to outmoded lone-inventor stereotypes. Not so; I am not asserting that groups are incapable of developing breakthrough insights once they have been hatched; indeed, we learn from the peer-review process that such development groups are essential to producing a high-quality result. Rather I am pointing out that every such group development starts from—is necessarily sparked by—one good idea in one person’s head. Cathedrals and bazaars and other social structures can catch that lightning and refine it, but they cannot make it on demand.”

Wales and Sanger were lucky, but I don’t think they were *just* lucky. Wales correctly identified those “socio-cultural conditions” which made Wikipedia so popular. Of the infinite possibilities for what projects Bomis should work on, he chose to work on a free encyclopedia. He read the market need perfectly, though his timing was a bit off. That’s what Wales is good at, and I think he did it again with Wikia Search, though 1) his timing was perhaps off once again, and 2) he didn’t pull together the right team to implement the product. As for Sanger, the historical record is a bit murky on this, but it is my understanding that he was the main driving force behind the policies formed during the early stages of Wikipedia. While I believe that some of those policies have proven to be mistaken, I think the majority of the mistakes made “by Wikipedia” were made after Sanger had been laid off. In fact, one of the worst mistakes made “by Wikipedia” (in this case by Wales) was the implementation of the arbitration committee, which was largely formed precisely *because* Sanger wasn’t there to make those types of decisions. Wales put far too much power into the hands of a group, and the result was a mess which in my opinion destroyed Wikipedia.