Marc Riddell wrote:
on 2/19/07 4:50 PM, Jossi Fresco at jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
I speak of a culture that has produced the most amazing results in the history of on-line collaboration.
Is the same culture that began WP the same one in place today?
I just crossed my four-year anniversary, and while I can't speak to the beginning, the culture hasn't really changed much in my time here. The biggest change for me is the larger scale; once upon a time I "knew" most of the admins and active editors, in the sense that I had read their work and had some sense of who they were. Now I can see a mention of somebody, wonder "who is that?", and see a history of 20K+ edits in areas I didn't even know existed. So I think the culture could change simply by different groups, unaware of each other, devolving into disparate subcultures.
The webcomics thing is a case in point. From my "old-school" POV :-) , I tend to regard webcomics as intrinsically non-notable, and yet there is another part of the WP community that is intensely focussed on writing about webcomics, defining inclusion criteria, etc. On the flip side, though, when I look at how they actually go about their work, it seems very much like things we did on the early days of the ships project, back in 2003. So I think that as long as we have some ongoing cross-pollination between different specializations, that we can keep things from splintering too much.
Stan