On 9/9/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
In all seriousness, I think DYK is one of the best tools we have for encouraging good new articles. Try as we might to downplay vanity, it is a cheering thing to see something you wrote on the front page; I try and ensure that as many articles that I write as possible are good enough to be DYKed - plus, as FF says, it's a guaranteed way to get people to come and edit your work, to link it into things you wouldn't have thought of...
Even if it's anonymous, we all like the egoboo of knowing people are reading our work. It's one of the hidden advantages of the wiki system, being able to see this so clearly.
There's vanity and then there's vanity. We can't downplay most vanity too much -- it's one of the main reasons that people will participate in a volunteer website! We don't pay people with money, we pay them with personal credit and a sense of participating materially in something bigger than themselves. Anthropologists and economists call this a [[gift economy]]. I'm not sure if that totally explains why so many people would waste their time ;-) on a wiki, but it's a nice start at a theoretical framework.
FF