Kelly Martin wrote:
This is the core, underlying attitude that dooms Wikipedia to mediocrity. Thousands of volunteer projects exist worldwide that places often quite strenuous obligations on their volunteers. (Think Habitat for Humanity.) And yet these projects survive, even thrive. Wikipedia already has a good core of volunteers who are willing to do as requested. We need to stop pandering to the self-centered lazy "volunteers" who will "only do what is fun" and instead target the committed volunteer who is willing to do the hard stuff that needs to be done.
By happy chance, and through Project Gutenberg's good graces, I've just been reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer again. After the fence gets painted, Twain ends the chapter with:
If [Tom] had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is / obliged / to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
I think the only thing that has changed in 150 years is that treadmills are no longer work, but play.
William