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People search for information with Google and Yahoo, but they often find it on Wikipedia, the sixth most-visited site on the internet. Everyone brings their questions there: students use Wikipedia to cram for exams; journalists, to check their sources; scientists, to broaden their view of a field.

Famously, Wikipedia isn’t a well-planned operation. Its salaried employees are massively outnumbered by tens of thousands of “editors” who, attracted by Wikipedia’s vision or irritated by its inaccuracies, take it upon themselves to contribute. And contribute they do: researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota estimate that volunteer editors have invested more than forty million hours of labor into Wikipedia, comparable to the effort required to build the underwater tunnel between Britain and France.

These contributing editors not only write articles, they also argue with each other. How should they describe controversial issues or track down hoaxes and errors? What should they do with ill-intentioned or chronically ill-behaved editors? How should they punctuate the movie title Star Trek Into Darkness?

Debates on these questions spill out well beyond any particular conflict, as editors write essays, propose policies, and build support for guiding principles—some might say rationalizations—to bring order to the chaos. What happens when they try?

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