QUOTE(gomi @ Sat 21st November 2009, 4:23pm)
I think Greg's point, a very good one, is that Wikipedia can hardly be called an encyclopedia, and ArbCom can hardly be called Arbitrators. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether it qualifies as a committee under the normal definition of that word.
While I quite like Wikipedia criticism and wish as fervently as anybody that there was more of it around here (the good kind, not the Eric-Barbour-saying-something-self-evident-and-following-it-with-a-barfy-emoticon kind), Wikipedia critics would do well to stop focussing on semantics.
To illustrate what I mean, let's consider this (hypothetical) quote from circa 1455:
"Books are made by monks with quills, and don't require ungainly machines, therefore the Gutenberg Bible can hardly be called a book."
Wikipedia shares some characteristics with encyclopaedias (it contains articles on subjects and does not define its scope by discipline) and differs in other ways from them (encyclopaedias are written by named experts, encyclopaedias are reasonably reliable). Whether the similarities are great enough to justify calling Wikipedia an encyclopaedia is a question that's as uninteresting as it is irrelevant.
(Things are somewhat more clearcut, although probably neither more interesting nor more relevant, with regards to the Arbitration Committee, which is certainly a committee and just as certainly not engaged in arbitration.)