Isn't it ironic how the exacting tolerance, openness and collaborative nature of a wiki results in imbalances that threaten their very existence? In the name of allowing everyone to have a go, there's a prominent wiki out there right now that is being swamped by children, aka kids.

They add the most inane information and everyone diligently puts up with it. Poor spelling, tragic grammatical construction and even worse, absolutely dreadful content, not to mention repetitiveness, are taking over the site. All in the name of having good faith in everyone. The good faith in the more mature community seems to be overlooked as this imbalance threatens to swamp the site and drown it.

Interestingly, given their poorly formed conceptions of social justice, tolerance, community ideals and self-responsibility, they meet any complaints about their efforts with whining, come-back-at-you's and pathetic recounts of political correctness that serve their own personal needs and not that of the community.

In the process, the adults are informed roundly and squarely and any which way possible that they must learn to collaborate and subsume their identity in the mass of the community; while at the very same time intense care must be taken not to tread on the ever-so-delicate toes of the hard-trying kids who dominate the site. They spend a great deal of time talking and very little time doing and yet their worth appears to be incalculable when placed side by side with the adults and more mature teen set that are actually contributing items of worth.

Still, if it brings in high readership rates, there is unlikely to be a change in this peculiar outcome. Maybe the only answer is to start a Junior version where all the grown-ups can hang out.