Perhaps it's more of a misunderstanding that this is still a wiki above
anything else - in particular, those understandings that literally
anyone else you write, and you can edit anything anybody else writes.
I believe those who have a good understanding of those two fundamental
wiki concepts tend to do better in a wiki environment (not just
Wikipedia) than most others who do not.
But this is coming from a person who specializes in building up
already-existing articles over trying to create brand new articles from
scratch.
-MuZemike
On 10/11/2010 1:51 PM, Gwern Branwen wrote:
On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Ryan
Delaney<ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Now here's the interesting point:
"High value participants are treated as special because they have
recognition& reputation from the community. But, as the community
scales, these social mechanisms break down and often, if nothing is
done to replace them, high value members get especially miffed at the
loss of special recognition and this accelerates the Evaporative
Cooling."
We have the reverse problem on Wikipedia, where visibility and
reputation allows some editors to get away with behavior that we
otherwise wouldn't tolerate. John Locke called this kind of reputation
'prerogative' -- it's now become a technical term in political
science, but it basically means that when we notice someone making
decisions that everyone else goes along with, we start to 'go with the
flow' and accept that person's authority in future cases as well. It's
a kind of momentum building of social power, and since it's the only
real power anyone has on Wikipedia, it is very significant - and
vulnerable to abuse. Where a contributor known to make lots of
valuable contributions in other areas suddenly demonstrates insanity
on a specific topic, people will tend to give way where they wouldn't
if it were coming from someone they didn't know or view as a 'valued
contributor'. The result is the 'evaporative cooling' of those who
don't have that social power on Wikipedia, or less of it, but whose
edits are no less valuable - if only less voluminous.
Arguably we have the reverse of your reverse problem.
What is the ultimate status-lowering action which one can do to an
editor, short of actually banning or blocking them? Deleting their
articles.
In a particular subject area, who is most likely to work on obscurer
articles? The experts and high-value editors - they have the
resources, they have the interest, they have the competency. Anyone
who grew up in America post-1980 can work on [[Darth Vader]]; many
fewer can work on [[Grand Admiral Thrawn]]. Anyone can work on
[[Basho]]; few can work on [[Fujiwara no Teika]].
What has Wikipedia been most likely to delete in its shift deletionist
over the years? Those obscurer articles.
The proof is in the pudding: all the high-value/status Star Wars
editors have decamped for somewhere they are valued; all the
high-value/status Star Trek editors, the Lost editors... the list goes
on. They left for a community that respected them and their work more;
these specific examples are striking because the editors had to *make*
a community, but one should not suppose such departures are limited to
fiction-related articles.