At the same time, many of the processes that were established early on depended on genuine good faith and a touching degree of idealism. Requests for comment were intended to draw in users for additional considered opinions, who had little or no history with the topic (or person) involved. For some time, that worked; however, today's requests for comment almost always wind up with the editors whose opinions had already been expressed repeating the same arguments, few additional uninvolved voices, and often as not the same divergence that existed beforehand.

We have been, to some extent, the victims of our own success. We grew exponentially and not organically, and given the roots of our community, the usual group structural forms were eschewed. There was also practically no money for anything for a very long time (our fundraisers now raise as much in a day as they did in the entire year when I first joined up), and very few employees who kept the operation together with shoestrings and sealing wax, while everything else was left to the editorial communities (and the volunteer developer communities) to keep things going. This "flattened hierarchy" of leadership worked reasonably well with a smaller editorial community that had barely scratched the surface of content creation, but quickly showed itself to be impractical when editors joined in droves - many of them focusing on hand-to-hand combat with vandals. Those who loathed wasting their time cleaning up after vandals were glad to have this newer cadre join them; however, there was a palpable difference in their reason for becoming part of the community, and when the number of highly active contributors more than doubled over a short period of time, it was impossible to provide an effective process to help them learn the technical, policy, and cultural expectations. Efforts to try to remedy some of these issues have been largely unsuccessful, with an overwhelming proliferation of often-conflicting policies that are nearly incomprehensible to the uninitiated, an overabundance of badly written and poorly descriptive templates, and a dependence on automated tools for social interaction.

many admins forget in the heat of the moment

• Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories: the birth certificate is real, the non-believers are fringe conspirators
• Global warming: it does exist, human activity has caused it to increase over time
• Apollo 11: they landed on the moon
• September 11 attacks: 19 hijackers crashes 4 planes at the behest of bin Laden. Not Jews, not George W. Bush.

Once the heat dies down, Gamergate controversy will follow suit, where the primary narrative will be the misogynist harassment of women, and "but ethics" will be the conter-claim, though not given even remotely the same weight as the primary.

I wish I could say that there were some teaching moments here, but I'm having a hard time finding them. I wish I could say that checkusers have learned what boundaries are not to be crossed – but judging by the reaction of my checkuser colleagues to the SPI that started this ball rolling, they already knew that. I am certain that none of them would have ever made such a direct link to a public person based on the evidence that was available in this case, and none of them, I am certain, would ever have emailed their SPI statement to the media at all, let alone before actually publishing it on-wiki. I hope the community can feel somewhat reassured about that. As editors, we’ve seen that the mainstream media we depend on for sourcing of so many of our articles is only slightly more accurate than the National Enquirer, a depressing thought given how much we rely upon them; perhaps it is time to rethink whether tomorrow’s fishwrap is really that reliable, and whether the momentary excitation of the media, ever hungry for anything even mildly salacious, is really worthy of a thousand bytes of “column space”. I hope that longtime editors and administrators will go back and read the BLP policy and really start enforcing it to the fullest – all of it, including removing relative trivia from articles about people, treating accounts that might possibly be the subject of the article with decency rather than bullying, and insisting that others also meet those standards. I can hope, but I’ve been hoping this for a long time and I’m seeing increasing disregard for the BLP policy as time has gone on. It’s time for others to pick up this torch. Don’t leave it to our outside critics (or even our internal critics) – this is a responsibility that all of us share. I'm just not convinced that "the community" agrees. I'd love to be proved wrong.