Back when it got going, it was easy to see Wikipedia as a great prospect for democracy. Build by ordinary people rather than experts, it could exemplify the wisdom of crowds. I haven't read enough about the website (still the only one of the world's ten most popular websites that's not privately owned), but I'm aware that it started being effectively run by a small sub-section of its editors quite a while ago. (This article, from as long ago as 2009, reports the results of an investigation suggesting that the top 2% most active editors were already producing some 75% of the content.) And I have edited a little bit. So here are some thoughts about how Wikipedia could better live up to democratic ideals.
Let's start with the apparent drift towards only a few people producing most of the content. In a way, we should be grateful to them for doing so much of the work. At the same time, they've been able to translate the increased time they've spent on Wikipedia into more power over editors, fulfilling some of the predictions of anti-democratic theorists in the process. (Robert Michels, for example, the Italian elitist, would probably have seen in Wikipedia a perfect exemplification of his Iron Law of Oligarchy, according to which even the most anti-hierarchical organizations end up being run by an elite.) The Wikipedia elite even has a series of bureaucratic protocols it can use to decide disputes and even inflict sanctions (bans and so on). You get these powers by being an administrator, something you do by putting a lot of time into the site and being selected by people who are already administrators.
You might think that it makes sense that putting a lot of time into the site gives you more power, and to some extent, it does. But the types of powers administrators have are needlessly strong. For example, if you've ever gotten into a dispute on Wikipedia, you'll know that they're usually resolved by administrators (usually the ones who happen to have come across a complaint). But there are other ways of resolving disputes - for example, a random sample of editors might be contacted and asked to vote on the issue.
One reason that isn't done is that, even though there are elections, Wikipedia has a longstanding devotion to consensus. What part consensus should play in democratic decision-making is a complicated and controversial topic, but it's safe to say it has some drawbacks. On Wikipedia, the problem is often that anyone who wants to oppose a certain change can shoot it down really easily - and here there's a bias towards people who feel especially riled up about certain topics. Whether people who feel especially strongly about something should have more of a say about it is another interesting issue in political theory (I would say they shouldn't, partly because that produces an incentive for people to get riled up). But emotion surely shouldn't be a trump card when it comes to what an encyclopaedia says.
One problem with consensus is that (despite its popularity among left-anarchists) it can actually embed a bias towards the status quo, since absolutely everyone has to agree in order for anything to change. With Wikipedia, that's buttressed by a bias towards people who happened to have edited something early on. It's easy to start an entry, but once it's there trying to change anything risks incurring the wrath of someone with a keen interest in keeping things as they are. If they change your edits back for no good reason, and you insist (even with a good reason), you're liable to be banned for 'edit-warring.' That's even though it takes two to edit-war, and there's no good reason for administrators to side with the defenders of the status quo (after all, a change might well be justified).
What other forms of bias does Wikipedia have? The site has its own limited data on the characteristics of its editors, but I haven't seen any detailed breakdown of the kind of people who edit. We can say one thing for sure, though - the kind of people who spend a lot of time editing Wikipedia are the kind of people who have a lot of time to spend editing Wikipedia. In other words, there's a bias towards the time-rich, a bias that's made worse by the tendency of veteran users to make use of the site's dizzying array of quasi-legal terminology ('You're violating NPOV!' and so on). Worse, if newbies (or even occasional contributors) don't show a ready familiar with the legalese, that can be used against them in a dispute. You might think, in a culture that took democracy seriously, that the reverse would be the case, with administrators trying extra hard to make sure that everyone could have equal access to fair treatment on the site, however long they'd previously spent on it.
Finally, there's the issue of 'NPOV' itself - Wikipedia's policy that entries should adopt a Neutral Point of View. Again, I haven't seen any research on the political views of contributors. But 69% of them said they contributed because they thought information should be freely available. Is that more of a left-wing view? Certainly, the complaints I've seen about departures from neutrality have been from the right. It's definitely something sincere Wikipedians should be careful about, and not only because neutrality is a good principle for a go-to source of information to follow. It's something we should be careful about if we want to make clear to possible contributors that Wikipedia's a site for everyone. That it is, in other words, a democratic concern.
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