On 5/25/06, Molu loom91@yahoo.com wrote:

While obviously exaggarated, the article does raise some interesting points. For example, the following sentence struck me as insightful: "The 'general public,' you see, is now an entity separate and distinct from those who actually control the creation of Wikipedia."

This is all of:

* True * Untrue * Not news.

It's pretty much inevitable that any project gathers a culture around it and becomes a distinct social entity. We identify as Wikipedians, don't we? Participants in the project don't just identify as the 'general public', and never have.

One can divide people into three classes, I guess: Wikipedians (those who edit Wikipedia and feel part of the community), casual editors (those who edit Wikipedia, most likely on an occasional basis), and those who have never edited.

It's definitely of interest how hard we are making it to move from the 'never edited' group to the 'casual editors' group, and how hard we are making it to move from that to 'Wikipedian'.

I do think we've made it more difficult lately.

Is this because we percieve those who are not Wikipedians as being less likely to become useful, active contributors, and more likely to be net negatives (vandals, trolls, or simply those without significant writing skill, knowledge, or research ability to be useful)?

I have a feeling it is. Are we correct? Partly, I think.

I attended the MySQL user conference in Santa Clara this year, the last keynote speech at which was by Mitch Kapor, largely on the topic of Wikipedia and how it changes things, and what it signifies. Afterward, I asked him what in his opinion we should be concerned about going forward - how could we screw it up, basically. His answer was that managing popularity and being increasingly mainstream was the biggest challenge, and that we could screw it up by reacting badly to popularity.

We could screw it up one of two ways. One is like Usenet's endless September. The influx of new people could swamp the culture of the place, drive off long-time contributors, and lower standards until nothing useful was being done anymore.

The other would be to react to popularity by over-reacting, pulling up the drawbridge and shutting ourselves off from the world at large. Becoming less welcoming, less friendly, more elitist.

IMO, we have to be very careful not to do things that send us too far in one direction or other.

Anyway, irrespective of the truth of these claims the permanent and (apparently) secretive semi-protection of pages will give us very bad publicity, particularly if this is applied indiscriminately to all pages in a category. I think the drawbacks of such a measure outweigh the benefits.

I'm inclined to agree. The secretiveness is not actually true, but possibly perceive-able as such. We at least ought to be careful and consider all possibilities.

-Matt