On 7 October 2010 19:39, Paul Houle <paul(a)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.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk