Re: [WikiEN-l] Evaporative cooling in online communities

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.