[WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?

[Stephanie Daugherty]

On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 4:43 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> On 04/07/11 9:05 PM, Stephanie Daugherty wrote:
>> IMO, the "next best thing" will be whatever can come along and solve
>> our social and community problems technologically, while being easier
>> to edit.
>
> Social and community problems cannot be solved technologically.
>

I beg to differ here. While not every social or community problem has
a technological answer, that doesn't mean we shouldn't seek one out
where a suitable one exists. We've already been doing it successfully
- things like the edit filter are applications of technology to social
problems (in this case vandalism) that have been proven to have real
world value.

When you have a small community, the community itself tends to
propagate and enforce certain standards of behavior, and distance
themselves from those that don't follow them. As that community grows,
it eventually reaches a point where people are added faster than they
can be assimilated into the norms of the community, and the behavior
of the community changes to follow the behavior of the masses that are
joining it, rather than people changing their behavior to fit
community norms.

Making some of those norms part of "how the system works" - that is,
inside the black box that is the software, takes the confrontations
out of the equation, while keeping the pressure to adhere to community
norms in place long after a handful of editors trying to enforce them
would have been overran and given up. Obviously you can't code "assume
good faith" into the software, but you can change the workflows and
information flow, and communication structure, and even site
permissions to encourage this, and to give someone a chance to stop
unwanted behavior like [[WP:BITE]]ing before it actually has an
effect.

Not every technological answer is going to be direct either - when you
are looking at fixing a people problem with a technological fix, you
have to look at the whole workflow in question, with a mindset of
"what can I change to head this off.... what else will it effect...
will it work...". It may take several rounds of that before a solution
is obvious, and even then, it may not be the right one, or there may
not even be one, but if you start thinking outside the box, oftentimes
something will come out of it that does work :)

Of course, it also works the other way -- look at how some templates
are being used on Wikipedia - the technology is often used to create
problems :)