On May 27, 2008, at 6:43 AM, Mark Nilrad wrote:
"Social control" can also be termed "mob rule". That term has previously been used to describe Wikipedia by outside sources.
Yes, and it's a fair accusation. But it's also necessarily going to be the case on a project as large as Wikipedia.
The problem should be understood as a problem of social engineering - how do we train our mobs to behave usefully?
Policy should be understood as the increasingly failed attempt to train our mobs via rigid control and stark delineation of what they can and can't do. It hasn't worked.
But this remains an engineering problem - perhaps, if I can be forgiven for using the term, the fundamental engineering problem of Web 2.0 - how does one engineer a community to behave in particular ways?
-Phil