Marc Riddell wrote
I was reviewing some television programming I have on tape, and came across an interview with the extraordinary dancer, choreographer and company director, Paul Taylor. In this interview with Jeffrey Brown on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" he said: "Sometimes I think a company's morale is more important than the choreography."
He was speaking about his own company of dancers; I think this should give us pause when we are considering our own community of editors.
"Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."
The 'point' is still the encyclopedia.
Charles
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on 5/28/07 9:56 AM, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com at charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Marc Riddell wrote
I was reviewing some television programming I have on tape, and came across an interview with the extraordinary dancer, choreographer and company director, Paul Taylor. In this interview with Jeffrey Brown on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" he said: "Sometimes I think a company's morale is more important than the choreography."
He was speaking about his own company of dancers; I think this should give us pause when we are considering our own community of editors.
"Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."
The 'point' is still the encyclopedia.
Charles,
Eliot aside; without the dancers there is no dance.
And, without the community, there is no encyclopedia.
Marc
On 5/28/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
And, without the community, there is no encyclopedia.
Yeah, but. To be a dancer takes intense training, years of suffering, years of sacrifice, a lifetime of committing oneself to difficult ritual, painful practicing, and putting everything one has on the line.
To be a contributer to Wikipedia takes the ability to type, hopefully the ability to read, and an Internet connection.
There's nothing remotely resembling a parallel.
On 5/28/07, Josh Gordon user.jpgordon@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/28/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
And, without the community, there is no encyclopedia.
Yeah, but. To be a dancer takes intense training, years of suffering, years of sacrifice, a lifetime of committing oneself to difficult ritual, painful practicing, and putting everything one has on the line.
To be a contributer to Wikipedia takes the ability to type, hopefully the ability to read, and an Internet connection.
There's nothing remotely resembling a parallel.
--jpgordon ∇∆∇∆
Well, there is a parallel. It means we should try to retain those people who have more than the ability to type and read...
On 5/28/07, Josh Gordon user.jpgordon@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/28/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
And, without the community, there is no encyclopedia.
Yeah, but. To be a dancer takes intense training, years of suffering, years of sacrifice, a lifetime of committing oneself to difficult ritual, painful practicing, and putting everything one has on the line.
To be a contributer to Wikipedia takes the ability to type, hopefully the ability to read, and an Internet connection.
There's nothing remotely resembling a parallel.
--jpgordon ∇∆∇∆
From 8 1/2 years as a dance parent, I have to agree there's not much comparison between a Wikipedia editor and a dancer, and the closer an editor gets to being like a dancer, the less useful they are as an editor imo. This is why many of the obsessive editors burn out, simply they become less useful as they devote more extreme amounts of time to editing Wikipedia, and less time to learning anything useful to add to Wikipedia. IMO.
Moral is pretty important, though, to any corporate structure and to volunteer organizations. That's why corporations pay billions to send employees on moral boosting working together retreats. The most successful volunteer organizations are those who manage to let their volunteers know they are appreciated while keeping the volunteers on track with the goal--neither of these things include telling established editors that they are worthless compared to newbie vandals who might some day be conned into contributing positively (again, in spite of the fact that all who repeat this mantra can't be bothered to actually ask the newbie vandal to contribute positively).
Moral is very important--that's common sense.
KP
--- K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/28/07, Josh Gordon user.jpgordon@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/28/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net
wrote:
And, without the community, there is no encyclopedia.
Yeah, but. To be a dancer takes intense training, years
To be a contributer to Wikipedia takes the ability to
type, hopefully
the ability to read, and an Internet connection.
There's nothing remotely resembling a parallel.
From 8 1/2 years as a dance parent, I have to agree there's not much comparison between a Wikipedia editor and a dancer, and the closer an editor gets to being like a dancer, the less useful they are as an editor imo. This is why many of the obsessive editors burn out, simply they become less useful as they devote more extreme amounts of time to editing Wikipedia, and less time to learning anything useful to add to Wikipedia. IMO.
Yes, from 10 years as a colleague of Essjay, nobody wants a historian that's spent 20 years studying history and archeaology digs, or a doctor that's spent 6 years studying chemistry and biology and 4 in practice. We'd much prefer a kid tell us what 4 out of 5 unnamed dentists recommend on a commercial site for a large corporation selling pharmaceuticals and spending money on motivational speakers to keep employee morale high. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/morale
As Stephen Colbert said in an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: "What I love about it is that it brings democracy to information. For too long, the elites that study things got to say what is or isn't real." - The Colbert Report, 2007.05.24
That's why it's far better to keep guys like Wolfy happy and doing a heckuva job than cut-and-run Japanese government officials hanging themselves over a little $236,000 bookkeeping fraud. Just ask Paul Wolfowitz. He'll tell you the $400,000 he received to step down as the World Bank president kept his morale and terrorist fighting productivity high.
~~Pro-Lick http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (Wikia supported site since 2006)
--spam may follow--
____________________________________________________________________________________Boardwalk for $500? In 2007? Ha! Play Monopoly Here and Now (it's updated for today's economy) at Yahoo! Games. http://get.games.yahoo.com/proddesc?gamekey=monopolyherenow
Cheney Shill wrote:
As Stephen Colbert said in an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: "What I love about it is that it brings democracy to information. For too long, the elites that study things got to say what is or isn't real." - The Colbert Report, 2007.05.24
Colbert has a point here. We surely do have crap like that.
But I think this is massively outweighed by the inverse effect. By putting power in the hands of the people, those people are having to confront issues and and learn skills that previously were the domain of the elite. The pyramid becomes wider. Not that Wikipedia is new in this; as far as I can tell things have been moving in this direction since Gutenberg.
Further, that crap is exactly what draws people in. Back before anybody had heard of Wikipedia, I was persuading my clients to use wikis as intranets. My number one trick for getting involvement was putting in mistakes: typos, formatting errors, and obvious omissions of information. Nobody would touch a finished-looking page. But give them something they could fix *right now* and they were hooked.
Heck, that's what hooked me. One minor fix three years ago, and now my favorite video game is CAT:CSD. Speaking of which, it was down to 15 speedy requests before I came to catch up on my mail, and now it's back up to 50. Onward! :-)
William
On 29/05/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Further, that crap is exactly what draws people in. Back before anybody had heard of Wikipedia, I was persuading my clients to use wikis as intranets. My number one trick for getting involvement was putting in mistakes: typos, formatting errors, and obvious omissions of information. Nobody would touch a finished-looking page. But give them something they could fix *right now* and they were hooked.
I'm *sure* we used to have a page recommending that, somewhere. Always be sure to leave something unfinished...
(There is one word which appears in about a third of the new articles I write. I can't spell it. It is always a source of delight to me just how fast someone will come by and fix it...)
On 5/28/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Cheney Shill wrote:
As Stephen Colbert said in an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: "What I love about it is that it brings democracy to information. For too long, the elites that study things got to say what is or isn't real." - The Colbert Report, 2007.05.24
Colbert has a point here. We surely do have crap like that.
But I think this is massively outweighed by the inverse effect. By putting power in the hands of the people, those people are having to confront issues and and learn skills that previously were the domain of the elite. The pyramid becomes wider. Not that Wikipedia is new in this; as far as I can tell things have been moving in this direction since Gutenberg.
In addition to encouraging people to become jacks-of-all-trades, Wikipedia has demonstrated that given a large enough pool of people, you'll find experts in essentially anything, who will percolate to the places that they're necessary.
It's not a pretty process, but it works.
On 5/29/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/28/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Cheney Shill wrote:
As Stephen Colbert said in an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: "What I love about it is that it brings democracy to information. For too long, the elites that study things got to say what is or isn't real." - The Colbert Report, 2007.05.24
Colbert has a point here. We surely do have crap like that.
But I think this is massively outweighed by the inverse effect. By putting power in the hands of the people, those people are having to confront issues and and learn skills that previously were the domain of the elite. The pyramid becomes wider. Not that Wikipedia is new in this; as far as I can tell things have been moving in this direction since Gutenberg.
In addition to encouraging people to become jacks-of-all-trades, Wikipedia has demonstrated that given a large enough pool of people, you'll find experts in essentially anything, who will percolate to the places that they're necessary.
It's not a pretty process, but it works.
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
Well we need to find some way or percolating more of them towards botany articles. More of the ones with time. Experts aren't always needed, though. Competence and good writing and editing skills, imo, outweigh expertise for a lot of things.
KP
On 5/28/07, Cheney Shill halliburton_shill@yahoo.com wrote:
--- K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/28/07, Josh Gordon user.jpgordon@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/28/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net
wrote:
And, without the community, there is no encyclopedia.
Yeah, but. To be a dancer takes intense training, years
To be a contributer to Wikipedia takes the ability to
type, hopefully
the ability to read, and an Internet connection.
There's nothing remotely resembling a parallel.
From 8 1/2 years as a dance parent, I have to agree there's not much comparison between a Wikipedia editor and a dancer, and the closer an editor gets to being like a dancer, the less useful they are as an editor imo. This is why many of the obsessive editors burn out, simply they become less useful as they devote more extreme amounts of time to editing Wikipedia, and less time to learning anything useful to add to Wikipedia. IMO.
Yes, from 10 years as a colleague of Essjay, nobody wants a historian that's spent 20 years studying history and archeaology digs, or a doctor that's spent 6 years studying chemistry and biology and 4 in practice.
~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (Wikia supported site since 2006)
Actually I'd even rather the more rounded doctor, the one who spent only four years or five years on chemistry and biology, then 6 years in medical school studying medicine, with year as an intern, and a residency on top of all that, then, heck, I'm an American, I like all my specialists to be fellows, too, see patients in specialty consulations, take primary and second opinion patients--the more diversity the better. My favoritet doctor was a nurser, first, that adds an even greater level of diversity. More rounded, change after a while, gain experience in one area, then put it into practice. Not sit at computer and research only via internet, then enter information.
Studying dance requires a lot, but it's different from studying medicine, it is more focused, less diverse (no matter that classical dancers are able to perform in most any technique and other dancers study classical ballet if they want to be great at something else), than most other fields of study. I'll take a ballerina who has studied nothing but classical ballet, though, over a doctor who has done nothing but study medicine any day.
KP
Marc Riddell wrote:
The 'point' is still the encyclopedia.
Charles,
Eliot aside; without the dancers there is no dance.
And, without the community, there is no encyclopedia.
Without the encyclopedia, we'd have no community. Both are necessary, and they are symbiotic.
Further, I believe both are in service to our readers, which is my ultimate measure of these things.
William
The 'point' is still the encyclopedia.
Marc Riddell wrote:
Charles,
Eliot aside; without the dancers there is no dance.
And, without the community, there is no encyclopedia.
on 5/28/07 6:14 PM, William Pietri at william@scissor.com wrote:
Without the encyclopedia, we'd have no community. Both are necessary, and they are symbiotic.
Agreed, so long as that relationship is based upon mutual respect.
Further, I believe both are in service to our readers, which is my ultimate measure of these things.
OK, the readers being the audience in this case. Still, without that crucial element of respect, you have nothing but a degrading sideshow.
Marc