This is beautiful and true, and you must watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEkF5o6KPNI
(I have been at a pub with a trivia quiz where the table of Wikipedians didn't enter because "it wouldn't be fair.")
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
This is beautiful and true, and you must watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEkF5o6KPNI
(I have been at a pub with a trivia quiz where the table of Wikipedians didn't enter because "it wouldn't be fair.")
Thank God it doesn't reinforce any stereotypes. Oh, wait ...
Charles
To an extent this is true, but no more (or less) than saying "all volunteers are weird". And they are. There are bound to be exceptions, but I find that with almost every single volunteer there is either something mentally wrong, or there is something seriously lacking in their social life.
I'm not really sure why this is, but I do have some ideas. One is that people want their life to have worth. Society provides with a number of things to do that. Having a job one is good in can provide such a sense of worth. Having good friends you share your life with can provide such worth. Most people do derive their sense of selfworth from something like that.
Some people volunteer to get a sense of self-worth. Wikipedia does this to a great extent. The overused Jimbo quote "Here, we are polite, thoughtful, smart, geeky people, trying only to do something which is undoubtedly good in the world: write and give away a free encyclopedia" shows that is exactly what we do. We want to do somthing worthwile. Now why do we want to do that? Because we believe our lives wouldn't be as worthwile if we didn't.
Now I am not saying that Wikipedians, or volunteers in general don't have good, rewarding jobs, or not enough friends, or whatever other common mechanism for self-worth is absent in their lives, just that they believe that their other means of generating selfworth are not enough in some sense. Just that they have chosen a very uncommon - or weird - way of gaining that self-worth, namely volunteering.
That very fact, that they have chosen such a weird way to define themselves, makes them weird.
As a final note: Weird doesn't equal bad. We wrote one of the most popular websites of all time. And all thanks to our weird way of generating self-worth.
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
This is beautiful and true, and you must watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEkF5o6KPNI
(I have been at a pub with a trivia quiz where the table of Wikipedians didn't enter because "it wouldn't be fair.")
Thank God it doesn't reinforce any stereotypes. Oh, wait ...
Charles
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
You could also ask why people work for money for encyclopedia publishers. I know some people who have worked as researchers at print encyclopedias, and they sure as hell didn't do it for the money (the pay was rubbish). It is not quite the same as volunteering for free, but the same altruistic aims are there - doing something for the love of it and because you think the end product is something worthwhile. That may feed into feelings of self-worth, but that is not the whole story. There should still be room for simply altruism that is not self-serving.
Carcharoth
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoekstra@gmail.com wrote:
To an extent this is true, but no more (or less) than saying "all volunteers are weird". And they are. There are bound to be exceptions, but I find that with almost every single volunteer there is either something mentally wrong, or there is something seriously lacking in their social life.
I'm not really sure why this is, but I do have some ideas. One is that people want their life to have worth. Society provides with a number of things to do that. Having a job one is good in can provide such a sense of worth. Having good friends you share your life with can provide such worth. Most people do derive their sense of selfworth from something like that.
Some people volunteer to get a sense of self-worth. Wikipedia does this to a great extent. The overused Jimbo quote "Here, we are polite, thoughtful, smart, geeky people, trying only to do something which is undoubtedly good in the world: write and give away a free encyclopedia" shows that is exactly what we do. We want to do somthing worthwile. Now why do we want to do that? Because we believe our lives wouldn't be as worthwile if we didn't.
Now I am not saying that Wikipedians, or volunteers in general don't have good, rewarding jobs, or not enough friends, or whatever other common mechanism for self-worth is absent in their lives, just that they believe that their other means of generating selfworth are not enough in some sense. Just that they have chosen a very uncommon - or weird - way of gaining that self-worth, namely volunteering.
That very fact, that they have chosen such a weird way to define themselves, makes them weird.
As a final note: Weird doesn't equal bad. We wrote one of the most popular websites of all time. And all thanks to our weird way of generating self-worth.
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
This is beautiful and true, and you must watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEkF5o6KPNI
(I have been at a pub with a trivia quiz where the table of Wikipedians didn't enter because "it wouldn't be fair.")
Thank God it doesn't reinforce any stereotypes. Oh, wait ...
Charles
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Martijn Hoekstra wrote:
To an extent this is true, but no more (or less) than saying "all volunteers are weird". And they are. There are bound to be exceptions, but I find that with almost every single volunteer there is either something mentally wrong, or there is something seriously lacking in their social life.
Even worse, some are actually librarians. You wouldn't be promoting the fallacy of normalcy, would you? Wiki-editing has a fraction of the popularity of video games, and is negligible compared to couch-potato TV watching, both of which might be considered normal; but are not to be considered as a "social life". (Actually, I've often wondered about cinema-going, sitting in the dark not talking to anyone - participatory but not actually that social.) I can remember when "doing your own thing" was rather more valued.
To pick up on Gerard's point: I have discovered that I'm no good at pub quizzes, at least those mainly based around TV presenters of programmes I don't watch. I did once use a fact from WP to impress a friend in a quiz (the Scoville scale).
Charles
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Martijn Hoekstra wrote:
To an extent this is true, but no more (or less) than saying "all volunteers are weird". And they are. There are bound to be exceptions, but I find that with almost every single volunteer there is either something mentally wrong, or there is something seriously lacking in their social life.
Even worse, some are actually librarians.
ha! Thanks Charles.
What I liked about Steven's talk is (reinforcing stereotypes or no) he was concise and funny about the fact that there is a big group of people who cares, a lot, about working on Wikipedia -- and there are reasons for what they do. I find that the idea that there are people behind wikipedia is something most readers don't think about or realize. If you are in the habit of thinking of wikipedia as a monolithic thing that magically appears ("wikipedia says that..." "wikipedia doesn't cover engineering well...") rather than as something that's actually created by people, you might be less likely to participate yourself.
And (stereotypes or no) personally I think he nails it as far as what makes wikipedians what they are (I call it "wikipedian syndrome" in my head). And this community is funny -- we are obsessive about analyzing the inner workings of the projects and how people relate to it, but less so about the people themselves and why they do it, or how people who *don't* fit in with these stereotypes might join the community.
Anyway, the context that he gave this talk should be taken into context -- Ignite Portland is a super-geeky series of lightning talks: http://www.igniteportland.com/about/ it's a reasonable assumption that many in the audience were pretty technically savvy, and probably had their own opinions about wikipedia already.
-- phoebe
phoebe ayers wrote:
I find that the idea that there are people behind wikipedia is something most readers don't think about or realize. If you are in the habit of thinking of wikipedia as a monolithic thing that magically appears ("wikipedia says that..." "wikipedia doesn't cover engineering well...") rather than as something that's actually created by people, you might be less likely to participate yourself.
The approach we are talking about is just what "Dilbert" does: the apparent premise is that people who work in those technology cubicles are impossibly needy. and the subtext is that "unless you are thoughtless about the technology you use, you'd better realise that it is a human creation". Parodying Wikimedians as Wikineedyans is the same play, and there would be little comedy about it unless the world wanted the WMF and its works. Which it does, so there.
Charles
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 10:33 PM, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoekstra@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not really sure why this is, but I do have some ideas. One is that people want their life to have worth. Society provides with a number of things to do that. Having a job one is good in can provide such a sense of worth. Having good friends you share your life with can provide such worth. Most people do derive their sense of selfworth from something like that.
Some people volunteer to get a sense of self-worth. Wikipedia does
I'll plead guilty to that. My participation on Wikipedia has been inversely proportional to my paid job satisfaction at the time. I've had days at the office where I'll come home and think "well, at least I achieved something today. Three new stubs."
Steve