Wikipedia’s governance is fundamentally broken, operating less like an open meritocracy and more as a tyranny of the dedicated. The platform purports to represent a massive global community of editors, yet its most critical systemic policies are routinely captured by a fraction of a percent of that pool. A stark case in point is the ratification of the English Wikipedia's binding AI content guideline (WP:LLM), which was enacted following a Request for Comment that closed with just 44 votes in favor out of tens of thousands of active contributors. This structural failure stems from an intense "time tax": navigating dense internal bureaucracies and litigating talk pages requires a massive, asymmetric availability of free time. Domain experts and casual contributors are systematically filtered out, leaving policy-making to a self-selecting oligarchy of hyper-active insiders. Ultimately, the system fails because it treats sheer endurance as a proxy for consensus, allowing the rules of the web's primary reference engine to be dictated by whoever has the bandwidth to outlast everyone else.