On 5/31/05, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Skyring wrote
Somewhere along the way, Wikipedia seems to have lost something
valuable. I look at this list and just about everything I see is one group of editors bickering with another group.
We gained ... an encyclopedia: 500000 articles in March, 10% added smoothly since then.
Nobody should kid themselves that there was ever a golden time when there was no 'bickering'. If you look at the traffic numbers you see huge growth. Every month or so an asocial user kicking up a fuss about the way things are handled... it's the price we pay for being a radically open community. Remember, this is a big volunteer project; all that happens is that some people simply make it too hard for them to be accepted as volunteers.
The large polite communities I mention are likewise "radically open". Yet they are polite and productive. They are not free from "bickering", but such disputes are minor and short-lived. Sure, the bulk of Wikipedia might proceed smoothly, but it's the "rough" aspects that bother me. I don't really care if most of the inhabitants of a large city live their lives free from crime - it's the assaults and murders that get on the front pages, and Wikipedia seems to have rather a lot of this compared to some other online communities.