May I ask what communities these are? Particularly the one with hundreds of thousands of members.
-Snowspinner
On May 31, 2005, at 1:44 AM, Skyring wrote:
On 5/31/05, Phil Sandifer sandifer@sbcglobal.net wrote:
That's it. That's all that's going to work. If we do not learn to come down on Cranstons with fury and speed, over time, this community will implode. One need only look at nearly every other Internet community to figure that one out.
Why not look at the Internet communities that DO work? I'm a member of two such communities that have been running for years, and include the sort of members who are well-educated, well-spoken, intelligent and fun to be with.
Both of them have very few rules and are largely run by the members. And above all, they are polite. Both of them are large communities that have dealt with growth in a plain common sense fashion, by recognising that new users don't have the same knowledge as "the old guard" and finding ways to deal with this.
Somewhere along the way, Wikipedia seems to have lost something valuable. I look at this list and just about everything I see is one group of editors bickering with another group.
For what it's worth, I'm an admin on one of these communities, a community with hundreds of thousands of members, and though I have power to add, delete, or modify just about anything on the site, my duties don't involve settling disputes or acting as an umpire, because there is very little of that to be done - my job mainly involves sorting out forgotten passwords or tracking down and correcting incorrectly entered information. It's a large but polite community, and I cannot help but contrasting it with the often poisonous atmosphere here on Wikipedia.
I'm also a moderator on a list very much like this, but again, I don't have to deal with members throwing bricks at each other - I mainly work at keeping out the spam merchants.
On the face of it, Wikipedia should be a place where co-operation and sharing drive an atmosphere of comradeship, where admins exist to help members rather than act as corporate police, and where the atmosphere is that of Utopia rather than 1984.
-- Peter in Canberra _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l