I'd add that we lost core values to be shared among many fiction
enthusiasts. From the spoiler warnings to excessive fair use we let
them drift away from the mission to the point pulling them back into
the fold was very nearly bloody.
On 10/8/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/8/07, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
It is solved the way all large organizations
solve things, by
compartmentalization. The WP compartments, most of them, work very
well.
On 10/8/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_09_05_a_bakeoff.html
>
> Gladwell's thesis is that although open source projects, which we can
> probably loosely define to include ourselves, bring together great
> expertise, but also create significant friction between the members of
what
> we call "the community". If I
could graph Gladwell's thesis and borrow
some
> economic jargon, I'd say that there is
some point on the curve where the
> marginal value of the cumulative benefits and disadvantages of expertise
and
> friction is equal to zero. (Okay, I was
trying to phrase this in a more
> simple way, but clearly I failed.)
>
> The question is: have we on Wikipedia reached a point where our
community is
> too big that the negative friction
overwhelms the positive value of our
> expertise?
>
> I'm just throwing this out for discussion, but I think this hypothesis
may
> prove to be true in some areas - namely
those frequently discussed on
this
> list. But in less high-activity areas, such
as quiet (i.e. not [[George
W.
Bush]])
articles, then we have a sufficiently small group of editors who
have space to think and bring their individual ability to bear.
Johnleemk
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--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
The downside of compartmentalization (which is clearly what happens in
WP) is that you have a tendency to lose a single set of consistent
core values across the whole project.
That's fine in some things... it doesn't hurt anything I am working on
or interested in reading that there are people who focus on cataloging
episodes of the Simpsons in WP articles... and less fine in others,
where things like BLP policy, NPA, WP:V and RS fall down in some
corners.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com
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