On 7 October 2010 19:39, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
There probably are thousands or tens of thousands of 'sharing' sites out there, and you can't draw a clear line between ones that are "big enough", the ones that are somebody's web-spam project (it isn't hard to make a flock of electric sheep that can beat the average Digger at the Turing Test), and ones that are just too little to matter... Not without offending somebody, and in a consensus-driven organization, that's a problem.
As an example of this problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Booksources and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:GeoTemplate
(These are enwp, but I'm sure other projects with similar things have similar issues)
These two pages aim to provide something vaguely like the social-sharing links - in the first case, resolving an ISBN to a particular source for a book; in the second, resolving a set of coordinates to a mapping service. Both began with a handful of major services and rapidly grew; inevitably, there were kludgy attempts to come up with "most important" ones, arguments over how to order them, etc.; and by now, both are pretty unenticing to use.
"Booksellers" is obviously a bigger pool than social networking sites or microblogging services or what have you, but I can certainly see Paul's point here that it's opening us up to a lot of potential hassle, and a lot of fuss from people who have very strong incentives to get their service listed.