[WikiEN-l] A thought on community dynamics

[David Goodman]

It is solved the way all large organizations solve things, by
compartmentalization. The WP compartments, most of them, work very
well.

On 10/8/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_09_05_a_bakeoff.html
>
> 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". If I could graph Gladwell's thesis and borrow some
> economic jargon, I'd say that there is some point on the curve where the
> marginal value of the cumulative benefits and disadvantages of expertise and
> friction is equal to zero. (Okay, I was trying to phrase this in a more
> simple way, but clearly I failed.)
>
> 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?
>
> I'm just throwing this out for discussion, but I think this hypothesis may
> prove to be true in some areas - namely those frequently discussed on this
> list. But in less high-activity areas, such as quiet (i.e. not [[George W.
> Bush]]) articles, then we have a sufficiently small group of editors who
> have space to think and bring their individual ability to bear.
>
> Johnleemk
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.