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That's a key insight.

On an average wikipedia page (or even topic), you will only encounter a small number of participants at a time. A lot of the time you can forget that the rest of the community even exists. You're likely to be fine even if you Ignore All the Rules [1][2]. As long as you mean well, good-faith interactions between individuals (if any!) will typically set you right. This is where Wikipedia is strong.

On highly popular pages, the number of participants can rise well above the actual empirical value of Dunbar's number for that page. At that point it becomes very hard to maintain order, and things can get very bureaucratic over even a single punctuation mark. This is where Wikipedia is weak.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

[2] Yes, even in 2022. O:-)



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