Stan Shebs wrote:
Marc Riddell wrote:
on 2/19/07 4:50 PM, Jossi Fresco at
jossifresco(a)mac.com wrote:
I speak of a culture that has
produced the most amazing results in the history of on-line
collaboration.
Is the same culture that began WP the same one in place today?
I just crossed my four-year anniversary, and while I can't speak to the
beginning, the culture hasn't really changed much in my time here.
I thought you were here longer than that. I think the culture has
changed. The Seigenthaler incident was a big turning point in that.
After that the rule bound control freaks seem to have become more
dominant. We had to respond to Seigenthaler, but in the process we
ended up with a lot of unnecesarily restrictive procedures.
The
biggest change for me is the larger scale; once upon a time I "knew"
most of the admins and active editors, in the sense that I had read
their work and had some sense of who they were. Now I can see a mention
of somebody, wonder "who is that?", and see a history of 20K+ edits in
areas I didn't even know existed. So I think the culture could change
simply by different groups, unaware of each other, devolving into
disparate subcultures.
Yes, I can even remember trying to predict when we would reach 100K
articles. Some of the creative energy can still be there in some
WikiProjects.
The webcomics thing is a case in point. From my
"old-school" POV :-) , I
tend to regard webcomics as intrinsically non-notable, and yet there is
another part of the WP community that is intensely focussed on writing
about webcomics, defining inclusion criteria, etc. On the flip side,
though, when I look at how they actually go about their work, it seems
very much like things we did on the early days of the ships project,
back in 2003. So I think that as long as we have some ongoing
cross-pollination between different specializations, that we can keep
things from splintering too much.
I can take or leave webcomics, but it's still interesting to see how
some of them regard Wikipedia.
Ec