on 10/8/07 10:52 AM, John Lee at johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Gladwell's thesis is that although open source projects, which we can probably loosely define to include ourselves, bring together great expertise, but also create significant friction between the members of what we call "the community".
To study this properly we need to more closely define "the community" as it relates to the Wikipedia Project.
<snip>
The question is: have we on Wikipedia reached a point where our community is too big that the negative friction overwhelms the positive value of our expertise?
In this case size does not matter when considering the negative friction. What does matter is the individual contributor's ability to interact in a constructive way with another contributor. You can have a group of a thousand persons, and, if each of these persons has the positive interpersonal skills to communicate with another, much can be accomplished. On the other hand, you can have a group of ten where the majority of them don't play well with others - and you will have a gridlock disaster.
The problems are not with the Community, but with the individual members who make up that community.
Marc Riddell