Wikipedia died last Friday, according to Nicholas Carr.

The end came last Friday. That’s when Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, proposed "that we eliminate the requirement that semi-protected articles have to announce themselves as such to the general public." The "general public," you see, is now an entity separate and distinct from those who actually control the creation of Wikipedia. As Vaughan-Nichols says, "And the difference between Wikipedia and a conventionally edited publication is what exactly?"

Given that Wikipedia has been, and continues to be, the poster child for the brave new world of democratic, "citizen" media, where quality naturally "emerges" from the myriad contributions of a crowd, it’s worth quoting Wales’s epitaph for Wikipedia at length……

As it turns out, Jimmy Wales commented on Nicholas Carr’s Blog - Rough Type -

."There have always been restrictions on editing," he says. I guess I made the mistake, as others may have as well, of taking literally Wikipedia’s slogan that it is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." I apologize for my error.

But if you think about - would you really want an authoritative document on the Internet that "anyone" could edit?   Say someone wrote a Wikipedia article on me - would I want to allow just "anyone" to make an authoritative statement about me?  I don’t think so.  I think you needed and still need restrictions on who can edit a document about anything - and if that’s supposed to mean the death of Wikipeida…then so be it.