[Wikipedia-l] I'm seeing a trend here or How to keep drivingaway good contributors

[Stephen Gilbert]

--- Larry Sanger <lsanger at nupedia.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Stephen Gilbert wrote:
> > No one on MeatballWiki tries to define the values
> of a
> > community. It is, however, a group of people who
> > analyze, discuss and build online communities.
> Many of
> > them are experts in this area.
> 
> "Experts"?  There are no experts in this area.  Or,
> if there are, all of
> us are.

That's an odd statement. There's no Ph.Ds, for
certain. But there are people who have years of
experience building, and failing to build, online
communities. I humbly submit that they have far more
expertise then you or I in this area (unless, of
course, you have more experience at this than I'm
aware of).

> > Learning from what others have done (and not done)
> is not the same as
> > looking to others to define Wikipedia.
> 
> I agree with that, but asking us to go to
> MeatballWiki to learn the terms
> of the debate is a bit much.  I have limited time
> for Wikipedia.  If you
> want to introduce a new term from MeatballWiki,
> together with all the
> values that it implies, then by all means do so--but
> do so *here*, on this
> list.

Absolutely.

> > There's a rich history from older wiki communities
> and projects that
> > we can, and should, draw upon, just as we draw
> upon existing sources
> > for encyclopedia articles.
> 
> Maybe.  I'm not actually sure that that's true;
> Wikipedia is a completely
> new thing.  It's a wiki, but it's a lot more than a
> wiki.

Perhaps, but we're still building on a foundation
that's largely wiki, and many of our problems have
also been faced by other wikis.

There are lots of other sources to learn from too:
older encyclopedia projects (why did they fail?),
commercial encyclopedias (is there anything we can
leverage from them in our project?) and the rise(s)
and fall(s) of other great Internet experiments
(Usenet, Slashdot).

Ok, I'll stop before I veer too far off inanother
direction. It's just I sometimes feel that we don't
use these sources knowledge available to us. Of
course, we're all busy, and there's only so much we
can do at once. Talking about the project should never
replace working on it.

> OK, now I really *am* done for today.
> Larry

I know the feeling. It's 2:00 am in my part of the
world. Goodnight...

Stephen G.

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