In week 11 I watched the Ted Talk by Jimmy Wales on 'the birth of Wikipedia'. He defines Wikipedia as a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in numerous languages. I was fascinated by this topic having previously learnt about user generated content in previous lectures. Anyone is entitles to edit and save content on Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales was the founder of Wikimedia Foundation who own Wikipedia, so listening to his talk on it was very credible and interesting.
Wikipedia, interestingly enough, doesn't cost a lot to run. They are funded by donations from the public and are more popular than the New York Times! Wikipedia do around 1.4 billion page views monthly with the total monthly cost of their bandwidth - $5,000!
When discussing quality control, yes there are people who vandalize Wikipedia pages in the sense of writing absolute rubbish but Wales states that this content is fixed very quickly due to the huge amount of users who have these pages on watch lists. There is also a 'delete' and 'keep' aspect to Wikipedia. However if 15 people say delete and 3 people say keep, sometimes the content will be kept if there is supporting evidence to back it up.
So it is important to understand the Wiki model is the way the company work it. Considering social methodology is the passion of the community Wikipedia are very flexible in the process they use to generate their content.
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