[WikiEN-l] oopsie-- mainstream journalists trust Wikipedia again

[Marc Riddell]

> Marc Riddell wrote:
>> on 10/7/07 11:04 AM, Thomas Dalton at thomas.dalton at gmail.com wrote:
>>> Then the community isn't rational - that doesn't really surprise me.
>> 
>> Wikipedia is an emotional community - not a rational one.
>> Whether this is acceptable is up to the Community itself.

on 10/7/07 11:40 AM, Steve Summit at scs at eskimo.com wrote:

> 
> Remember, too, that Wikipedia is supposed to be a community
> second (or, idealistically, not at all) and an encyclopedia-
> writing project first.
> 
> The nice thing about all this emotional hand-wringing policy
> stuff is that a lot of the time, you can just ignore it (well,
> as long as you're not reading this mailing list, anyway :-) )
> and get on with the task of writing the encyclopedia.
> 
You miss a huge point here, Steve. An "encyclopedia-writing project" is a
collaboration of a community of people. And the quality of that
collaboration is, to a great degree, dependent upon the emotional state and
interaction of that community.

Like it or not, Wikipedia is not a refuge from having to deal with people.

Marc