[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:04 PM, wiki <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>> But..... where we are in competition with others is for the time of the
>> undergraduate/graduate who sits down to squander some time on the internet.
>> He's got any number of choices - what we draw him to Wikipedia and make him
>> stick around? I wonder that the downturn in Wikipedia contributions is due
>> largely to their being more "grown up" social networking phenomena than
>> there were in 2004. Now, it is tempting to say that the fact that the
>> "myspacers" have buggered off is not bad thing - but I wonder how many
>> intelligent, educated people are now squandering time on Facebook who once
>> might have been Wikipedia contributors?
>
> I've had similar thoughts, but more general, thinking that the
> internet in general has more potential for people to "waste their
> time" than ever before. How many scientific theorems and great books
> and works of art are going to be left undone because people are
> wasting their time on Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and the like (and
> all the other websites and other online distractions out there)? You
> would *hope* that the truly exceptional in each generation avoid such
> traps and fulfil their potential, harnessing the power of the internet
> rather than being sucked into a churning maw, but you never know. And
> yes, I do think being a Wikipedia editor is more productive than using
> Facebook and Twitter. :-)

My god, this is getting serious.

Maybe we should ban cafes.

And bars.

And these movie theater things...

And what's this all about with this Television thing, now, it's
clearly just wrongheaded...




Actual work, and the average portion of actual work that people do on
a volunteer basis, isn't changing much.  How people socialize is, but
people are social animals.  We do that.  We're wired to do it.  We're
supposed to do it.  Anyone who thinks that 14 hour workdays 7 days a
week is preferable to the usual 8x5 is welcome to their obsession, but
will stand alone.  The work product of normal humans that don't
socialize enough drops off, according to numerous professional studies
over many decades.  There's a reason most workweeks are targeted at 40
hrs.  That's the maximum you can get out of average "information
workers" before they drop overall output.

We get a slice.  It's not an insignificant slice.  We can do better
with utilizing it, but we're doing pretty damn well all things
considered.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com