Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.

It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.

In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.