The essential question that can be raised in the Wikipedia phenomenon is obvious: why does it work? This question is specifically this: why do people so passionately contributing tons of organized information voluntarily, spending a significant amount of their own time? Nobody pays them - no money nor credit. What could be the motivation system for them, and could it work for other things than a giant Internet encyclopedia and thus revolutionizing the very concept of information society itself?
My theoretical assumption is that it deals with the desire to take over the hegemony of the social knowledge system. The shift is from the small group of established experts to the more non-institutionalized people in general. They have the immense need (or the feeling of necessity) of the general public to (1) produce knowledge that was not considered to be worthy of being formalized into knowledge, and (2) participate into the process of production of social standard reference knowledge. The first element reflects its results on one of the characteristics of Wiki: a giant pool of trivia, especially on popular culture, tech geekery etc. The second element is evident in the open discussion pages and editing policies.
It means that there is the need to fill in the structural gap in the communication network of knowledge. The players existed and expanded, but their roles were excluded in the knowledge production system - now they want to fill in the hole. That explains in parts why Wikipedia is so popular while other projects of the Wikimedia experiences less general support (e.g. Wikinews, with only about 10 articles being updated daily). Simply accumulation of information does not provide motivation. It is the goal of filling up what should have been there, and setting a standard body of reference for a particular knowledge that gets motivates the contributors. At least that's my hypothesis, which I should be positively proving from here on... a long way to go.
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