I like that example, too. Well stated. My observation was that the whole episode reeked of something you'd expect to play out on reddit, but not the old-school HN.
Yeah, it definitely had a sort of mobbish feel to it. I've been a Wikipedian since about 2003, been in and out of the meta-circles, and have a mix of positive and negative opinions about how it works (but I think on the whole it's a huge benefit to accessibility of knowledge). So when something like this comes up in a community I'm also part of, I usually try to participate in the discussion. Not even really just to defend Wikipedia, because there are plenty of criticisms one could make. But it was hard to figure out where to enter into the discussion, and what productive result could come from it.
When there's a bunch of angry people wielding pitchforks convinced that Wikipedians (or some subset) are evil bastards who hate knowledge and love nothing but rules, it's not that conducive to calm discussion. There's just sort of a vaguely defensive, "well, it's not quite like that, you know most of us also think about these issues and have tried to balance the criticisms many people have of Wikipedia, and even some of the rules and guidelines I disagree with do have some reasons they exist, but nobody seems very interested in discussing any of that, so I guess I'll just mostly sit this one out...". To be fair, there was some good discussion buried in some of the threads.
(As a non-HN-specific aside: What's frustrating from the perspective of someone who wants to make Wikipedia work is that it seems most external discussion of Wikipedia comes in these weird mob frenzies, but they come from opposite sides. One group of people is convinced Wikipedians are a bunch of rule-loving fascists; another group of people is convinced Wikipedians are a bunch of anarchistic amateurs with a hippy anything-goes attitude. So the first group gets angry when a topic they're a fan of is deleted, and demands fewer rules; the second group initiates big frenzies like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_biography_controversy, and demands more rules.)
