> The website where the efforts were finally consolidated was a central place, but it could very well have been developed as a network of nodes dedicated to different aspects of the explanation of areas of knowledge; the license allowed that. And the growth was initially not coordinated from a central place, an anarchic community began working on different areas and only later began coordinating by building top level behavior policies (as intended).

This is a remarkable framing that skirts around the fact that Wikipedia started as a single project and website and remains a single project and website today. Neither crowdsourcing content nor having a permissive license require or even imply decentralisation of any kind.