Not "trolling", but wondering if there is a different lens through which to
view the present situation.
Let me preface a question with this:
NPoV has worked spectacularly well on topics that are largely text
book(ish), but it would appear that current events, which do not easily
submit to text-book analysis, seem to be the attractor basins for the
issues in play.
My question is this:
Is NPoV the right model for dealing with current events, particularly in
the case of issues where *all* points of view, that is, as-well-as-possible
justified points of view, are crucial to understanding the situation?
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Nicolas Jullien <
Nicolas.Jullien(a)telecom-bretagne.eu> wrote:
Hello,
to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by
Marwell and Oliver
"The Critical Mass in Collective Action" (1993)
http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_
Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsC&redir_esc=y
which points that fact that after some times, project are "mature" and
need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in adulthood
(which is, sometime, boring)
Nicolas
Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit :
> Hi everyone,
>
> I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread:
> *"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not result in
> even higher levels of bureaucracy? Internet technologies have certainly
> allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not
> so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably
> still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000
> active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by
> far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not
> have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities
> like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around
> 2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy
> sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case
> basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become
> necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you
> want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would
> have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the
> current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise…
> *"English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility". I
> would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the
> WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper
> <http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=NEG_021_0021> on Wikipedia
> politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level
> of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important
> features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have
> any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this
> link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…).
> *Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities
> tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate.
> The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down
> <http://scoms.hypotheses.org/241> after 2012. This is not because these
> communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is
> way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in
> addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a
> rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these
> current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within
> the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly
> not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for
> women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up
> patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of
> home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on
> enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active project
> <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Aide_et_accueil> to greet
> newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed down an
> inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but hardest) way to
> enhance participation would be to make some global change on society
> (reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working time,
> creating a basic income, you name it…).
>
> That's all, folks
>
> PCL
>
> Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit :
>
>> Hey folks,
>>
>> I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really
>> relevant to the thread it appeared in.
>>
>> Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia. I'm studying the nature of
>> socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case
>> study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but
>> personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems
>> work & break down. When it reaches maturity, I hope that Wikidata
>> will benefit from what I have learned.
>>
>> -Aaron
>>
>>