The Professional Lurker notes an article by the FreeRange Librarian which identifies the important role of deleting/removing material of dubious quality. This function, too, exists in the Wikipedia: Votes for Deletion . Otherwise, this argument simply reduces to the one of authority which the Librarian has raised in the past. Authoring, editing, deleting, and moving -- and soon article validation by user feedback -- all exist in the Wikipedia. Some, such as the Librarian and Sanger simply want to highlight or make use of experts' abilities. This is difficult when all users -- including the jerky clueless -- have the same standing and victory is more often achieved by dogged verbosity. So, there is inevitably frustration on the part of some. Such as it is. The Wikipedia is a working experiment on this note. (And if you want to look into the petri dish, see the discussion of Wales' credentials idea .)