On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 3:54 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-coo…
Warrens versus plazas. The former scales (writing articles), the
latter doesn't (the project space areas of Wikipedia, participating in
which sets you firmly on the path to working through your
eighteen-month wikiburnout).
- d.
Now here's the interesting point:
"High value participants are treated as special because they have
recognition & reputation from the community. But, as the community
scales, these social mechanisms break down and often, if nothing is
done to replace them, high value members get especially miffed at the
loss of special recognition and this accelerates the Evaporative
Cooling."
We have the reverse problem on Wikipedia, where visibility and
reputation allows some editors to get away with behavior that we
otherwise wouldn't tolerate. John Locke called this kind of reputation
'prerogative' -- it's now become a technical term in political
science, but it basically means that when we notice someone making
decisions that everyone else goes along with, we start to 'go with the
flow' and accept that person's authority in future cases as well. It's
a kind of momentum building of social power, and since it's the only
real power anyone has on Wikipedia, it is very significant - and
vulnerable to abuse. Where a contributor known to make lots of
valuable contributions in other areas suddenly demonstrates insanity
on a specific topic, people will tend to give way where they wouldn't
if it were coming from someone they didn't know or view as a 'valued
contributor'. The result is the 'evaporative cooling' of those who
don't have that social power on Wikipedia, or less of it, but whose
edits are no less valuable - if only less voluminous.
This is a problem that is largely the result of what this author calls
the 'plaza' nature of Wikipedia: where one has had a pleasant and
long-standing editorial relationship with a contributor, you will tend
to afford a lot of prerogative to that contributor, even when you see
them engaged in disputes about which you know very little. You respect
and maybe admire that contributor, but you don't see them from the
standpoint of other people -- whose experience may not be so rosy.
The Wikipedia community has the illusion of being homogenized, but it
is not, in that sense; because every editor only has his fingers in so
many pies, he can't know whether the rest of them taste good or not.
- causa sui