on 10/8/07 10:52 AM, John Lee at johnleemk(a)gmail.com wrote:
Gladwell's thesis is that although open source
projects, which we can
probably loosely define to include ourselves, bring together great
expertise, but also create significant friction between the members of what
we call "the community".
To study this properly we need to more closely define "the community" as it
relates to the Wikipedia Project.
<snip>
The question is: have we on Wikipedia reached a point
where our community is
too big that the negative friction overwhelms the positive value of our
expertise?
In this case size does not matter when considering the negative friction.
What does matter is the individual contributor's ability to interact in a
constructive way with another contributor. You can have a group of a
thousand persons, and, if each of these persons has the positive
interpersonal skills to communicate with another, much can be accomplished.
On the other hand, you can have a group of ten where the majority of them
don't play well with others - and you will have a gridlock disaster.
The problems are not with the Community, but with the individual members who
make up that community.
Marc Riddell