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This is an essay, a page containing the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints, and they may be heeded or not based upon your judgement and discretion.

This page in a nutshell: Keep your eyes on the encyclopedia prize.

Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is a truly remarkable project. Comprising over 2,579,212 articles as of October 12, 2008, it is forged by the efforts of unpaid volunteers, and it grows every second, and, hopefully, will, for many years to come.

As is inevitable in a project of this size, in which so many individuals are involved, a community has formed and flourished from the building site that is the encyclopedia. This community works co-operatively to regulate, discuss, ensure the successful running and building of the encyclopedia. The functionality of the community is underpinned by several core concepts dictating the processes by which decisions are made, such as the idea of deriving consensus from users participating in a discussion, and of weighing comments rather than counting votes in a debate. From these central principles come the various policies that govern and document user conduct, the way the encyclopedia is built, and the Wikipedia model itself. Thus, Wikipedia has become a hybrid of political doctrine and encyclopedic collaboration.

The political and communal side of Wikipedia has grown to become the central focus of activity for many people, and Wikipedia has transformed into something more than an encyclopedia, in good ways and bad. While the policy-based areas of Wikipedia ensure the prospering and continuance of the encyclopedia, it also serves, in many ways, as the source of much deliberation in and distraction from the realisation of Wikipedia's vision: to bring free knowledge to everyone on the planet. An increasingly bureaucratic and procedurally static community constantly debates over trivial matters that have little relation to the encyclopedia itself, while often pointless controversy almost constantly divides the latter and results in further disorder, chaos and disagreement. While many may argue that it is, again, inevitable that, in a large community, such distractions and strayings from the cause occur, perhaps it doesn't have to be that way, and a wake up call is all that's needed. The fact is that most users joined the project with the goal of writing an encyclopedia, so let's get back to it. If not to help in the writing of a free encyclopedia, why are we here?