Skyring wrote:
On 6/4/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Skyring wrote:
Why not look at the Internet communities that DO work?
How can we when you haven't mentioned what they are?
Are you saying that you only know of non-functional Internet communities?
No, I just think that different people have different opinions on what constitutes a community that "works". In my mind, Wikipedia works, but clearly you disagree. So when you tell us to look at something that fulfills _your_ criteria, you should tell us what it is, or we will be left to guess what _your_ criteria are.
But anyway -- I've noticed elsewhere in the thread that you were probably talking about LiveJournal and BookCrossing. I don't know the latter. As for LiveJournal, you mentioned that it "includes the sort of members who are well-educated, well-spoken, intelligent and fun to be with" -- I might have agreed to that about two or three years ago, but in my experience LiveJournal is increasingly taken over by the illiterate. It is also a long shot to claim that it "works" -- it is the target of avalanches of spam and trolling, and the management barely comes up with features to even come anywhere near combatting it. When a LiveJournal community still has active maintainers, they can keep the noise somewhat down by deleting and banning, but it is a lot of work and not very rewarding (you get a lot of complaints that you have deleted legitimate stuff). In practice, most communities, not to mention all syndicated feeds, do not have (active) maintainers.
I'm not sure why I've written all this, as it doesn't really have anything to do with Wikipedia. LiveJournal is not a creative or collaborative work, so the aspects that make it "work" are entirely irrelevant for Wikipedia.
Timwi