On 12/05/07, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry to sound cynical, but I really think a lot of people are blind to how despotic and anarchic things really are on Wikipedia. It's a wonder anyone stays involved with Wikipedia for long - obviously we must attract a lot of strong-willed and determined individuals as editors.
The typical life cycle of involvement in Wikipedia seems to correspond with that in most online communities. We're not actually unusual in this regard.
(And for those who compare Wikipedia to a MMORPG, we also correspond appallingly well with those.)
I posted the Clay Shirky link already. Nothing that's wrong with Wikipedia's community is in any way novel whatsoever, and its problems are not due to malice or gross negligence - they're entirely natural to social groups, online or off. So here's the Shirky link again, which I asked the list to comment on before: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html And here's my take again: http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/05/02/revealed-why-the-community-is-on-c...
The only way to stop the Wikipedia community's problems is to kill it off entirely. Disperse it, break it up, reboot it. This may not actually be a good idea, of course.
- d.