On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Martijn Hoekstra wrote:
To an extent this is true, but no more (or less) than saying "all volunteers are weird". And they are. There are bound to be exceptions, but I find that with almost every single volunteer there is either something mentally wrong, or there is something seriously lacking in their social life.
Even worse, some are actually librarians.
ha! Thanks Charles.
What I liked about Steven's talk is (reinforcing stereotypes or no) he was concise and funny about the fact that there is a big group of people who cares, a lot, about working on Wikipedia -- and there are reasons for what they do. I find that the idea that there are people behind wikipedia is something most readers don't think about or realize. If you are in the habit of thinking of wikipedia as a monolithic thing that magically appears ("wikipedia says that..." "wikipedia doesn't cover engineering well...") rather than as something that's actually created by people, you might be less likely to participate yourself.
And (stereotypes or no) personally I think he nails it as far as what makes wikipedians what they are (I call it "wikipedian syndrome" in my head). And this community is funny -- we are obsessive about analyzing the inner workings of the projects and how people relate to it, but less so about the people themselves and why they do it, or how people who *don't* fit in with these stereotypes might join the community.
Anyway, the context that he gave this talk should be taken into context -- Ignite Portland is a super-geeky series of lightning talks: http://www.igniteportland.com/about/ it's a reasonable assumption that many in the audience were pretty technically savvy, and probably had their own opinions about wikipedia already.
-- phoebe