IMHO, it is natural for communities, real or virtual and small or large, to fracture over time. It doesn't really matter what, nor why, nor who causes splits and forks. The important thing is that social software needs to have built-in support for fracture. This is why I think Wikipedia should think about supporting perspectives instead of limiting 'anyone can edit' policy.

Perspectives may be just multiple views on one or more topics. Visually, perspectives can be listed textually or iconically. Perspectives done right allows unpopular perspectives to die and new perspectives to gain popularity. Popularity of a perspective could be measure by country and used as the default perspective for that country. Supporting othogonal editorial communities would work well with perspectives I think.

Note that, with perspectives, objective views can be just another perspective or thrown out entirely in favor of biased views which tend to be easier to write and, IMHO, more enjoyable to read.