Nick Boalch wrote:
Users who [emphasize community over encyclopedia-building] need to be pointed to [[WP:NOT]]. Users who [advocate encyclopedia-building *only*] need to be gently reminded of the value of collaboration and consensus.
With that said, however, I think we all need to remember just how very powerful and inevitable the community aspects can be. Nick wasn't trying to deny them entirely and neither is [[WP:NOT]], but sometimes, some of our efforts to "quash" certain community aspects run headlong into that inevitability. And in particular, the "value of collaboration and consensus" is only part of the equation. Yes, good community values that foster collaboration and build consensus are important, but those aren't the only community values that matter -- there's more at stake here; there are other inevitabilities.
For anyone at all interested in these issues, there's an essay by [[Clay Shirky]] that I think is required reading. It's got the strange and provocative title "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", and it's at
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
I'm sure plenty of people here have read it, and I'm sure some disagree with it. But I think it's very, very apropos, and it's definitely worth a read, even if you've read it before. (As an added bonus he even talks about Wikipedia, and notes that we're doing remarkably well, which does not mean we get to ignore the pitfalls that have fatally fractured other communityesque projects.)
There are two things he says, in particular, that strike me as absolutely crucial:
The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very quickly.
So in our case, just because the Wikimedia Foundation says something (and no matter how much some of us might agree with it), doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work, doesn't necessarily mean groups of users aren't going to absolutely insist on doing something else.
The second crucial thing is one of the basic patterns that Shirky quotes Bion as having discovered about groups:
The identification and vilification of external enemies.
My take on this is that groups are going to do this no matter what, so we can't hope to quash it, all we can do is try to channel it constructively. And the way to do that, I think, is to make sure that the vilified external enemies are in fact external.
As long as Wikipedians imagine that "the enemy" is one of those non-wiki Encyclopedias like Britannica, or some open but hopelessly POV resource other than Wikipedia, that's fine. As long as Wikipedians feel that their main opposition is other encyclopedias, and are thereby inspired to make this one even better, that's fine.
But the problems, of course, arise when one subgroup of Wikipedia editors identifies another subgroup as an enemy, or when a group of users identifies "the admins" as an enemy.
I haven't mentioned userboxes yet. The group and community issues Shirky talks about apply to far more questions than just userboxes, although lately userboxes have been the most obvious and probably the purest example.
And userboxes are, if anything, a real paradox. On the one hand they obviously make some users feel good about their membership within the encyclopedia-building community, and that's good. But on another hand they can help some users identify themselves within subgroups and factionalize against other users who then become enemies, and that's bad. But then, on yet another hand, if "old-guard users" and administrators are too heavyhanded in arguing against or deleting or banning userboxes, users will obviously start identifying admins and anti-userbox users as the enemy, and that's even worse.
I'm not posting this message to claim I have an easy answer to the userbox problem, or to any other hard community problem. I'm not posting this to claim that Clay Shirky Is Right about Everything. But I do think that some of these community-related issues are absolutely inevitable, and that we cannot necessarily make them go away just by listing them on [[WP:NOT]], or asking people who disagree to leave. In many cases, we've got to figure out ways to accommodate them, while making sure they don't counteract the goal of building an encyclopedia.
Steve Summit [[User:Ummit]]