On Mon, 6 Feb 2006, David Gerard wrote:
Heh. Since you bring it up, I'll give the list the comparable experience of Uncyclopedia.
The following is probably off-topic, but since the subject line is appropriate to my subject, I'm hi-jacking this branch of the thread.
Last weekend I took part in the RecentChangesCamp that was held here in Portland, where I had the oportunity to talk to Ward Cunningham & heard from him his experience with his own pioneering Wiki at www.c2.com. (He may have discussed it at Wikimania last summer, but the first time I heard about the following was last weekend.)
One thing he had done -- much as Jimbo did a few years ago with Wikipedia -- was to identify a number of contributors (either 14 in number, or a total of folks whose average time dedicated to Wikiwiki totalled an FTE of 14, I'm a little hazy here) who showed sufficient knowledge of how the Wiki & the community worked, & made them his assistants to help him deal with spam, vandalism, & other malicious behavior towards the Wiki. This allowed him to step back & devote more time to other things, & because he wasn't as closely involved in the day-to-day activities of the wiki on c2.com he was spreading the word of the success of the Wiki way, how the community was successfully managing itself & dealing with its problems. And he honestly believed this.
He had this utopian belief corrected after a couple of years when the Wiki was rocked by a severe flamewar over a "trivial matter" that had gone as far as the opposing sides each creating bots to revert the edits of the other side. (For the record, the controversy was over whether to keep or delete a node that was a parody of the movie "Fight Club", called "BoogerClub".) As he spent time not only to get to the bottom of the matter, but also to bring himself up to date with the Wiki & the community, he discovered that the struggle to keep the Wiki usable & in order had burned out his assistants in their long, hard & unappreciated efforts.
Ward said he was able to help his assistants by adding a simple bit of code which prevented bots from functioning on his Wiki -- which stopped the spamming immediately & brought a cease-fire to the major flamewar, but the damage had been done. People left, & WikiWiki "plateaued" in growth, losing something of its original excitement & attraction.
I've held off on sharing this story with this mailling list because I feel that in telling it, it should have a moral or a lesson -- but I'm not smart enough to point to it. Except to belabor the obvious point that Wiki communities aren't as self-regulating as people think they are.
Geoff
(P.S. I talked about Wikipedia at the conference to quite a few interested people, & I hope I didn't help perpetuate too many myths. You can check the record at www.recentchangescamp.org & learn for yourself.)