> The people contributing to WP - the editors - seem more concerned with coming up with Kafka-esque processes to introduce to the community than making the actual work of making an encyclopaedia

This is one of the biggest challenges with building a self-governing online community: The people with the most time, energy, and desire to be in charge are often not the people with the most to contribute. As the bureaucracy grows, actual contributors are increasingly disincentivized from participating in the governance because it becomes such a distraction to actually producing content. At the extremes, these communities end up with highly-political community governance that spends much of their time with political maneuvering and focusing on a handful of fringe issues, while the actual content creators end up operating largely independently.

If you ignore the politicking and realize it's mostly a distraction, there's often good work still happening on the core content.