Nick Boalch wrote: With that said, however, I think we all need to remember just how very powerful and inevitable the community aspects can be. Nick wasn't trying to deny them entirely and neither is [[WP:NOT]], but sometimes, some of our efforts to "quash" certain community aspects run headlong into that inevitability. And in particular, the "value of collaboration and consensus" is only part of the equation. Yes, good community values that foster collaboration and build consensus are important, but those aren't the only community values that matter -- there's more at stake here; there are other inevitabilities. For anyone at all interested in these issues, there's an essay by [[Clay Shirky]] that I think is required reading. It's got the strange and provocative title "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", and it's at http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html I'm sure plenty of people here have read it, and I'm sure some disagree with it. But I think it's very, very apropos, and it's definitely worth a read, even if you've read it before. (As an added bonus he even talks about Wikipedia, and notes that we're doing remarkably well, which does not mean we get to ignore the pitfalls that have fatally fractured other communityesque projects.) There are two things he says, in particular, that strike me as absolutely crucial: The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very quickly. So in our case, just because the Wikimedia Foundation says something (and no matter how much some of us might agree with it), doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work, doesn't necessarily mean groups of users aren't going to absolutely insist on doing something else. The second crucial thing is one of the basic patterns that Shirky quotes Bion as having discovered about groups: The identification and vilification of external enemies. My take on this is that groups are going to do this no matter what, so we can't hope to quash it, all we can do is try to channel it constructively. And the way to do that, I think, is to make sure that the vilified external enemies are in fact external. As long as Wikipedians imagine that "the enemy" is one of those non-wiki Encyclopedias like Britannica, or some open but hopelessly POV resource other than Wikipedia, that's fine. As long as Wikipedians feel that their main opposition is other encyclopedias, and are thereby inspired to make this one even better, that's fine. But the problems, of course, arise when one subgroup of Wikipedia editors identifies another subgroup as an enemy, or when a group of users identifies "the admins" as an enemy. I haven't mentioned userboxes yet. The group and community issues Shirky talks about apply to far more questions than just userboxes, although lately userboxes have been the most obvious and probably the purest example. And userboxes are, if anything, a real paradox. On the one hand they obviously make some users feel good about their membership within the encyclopedia-building community, and that's good. But on another hand they can help some users identify themselves within subgroups and factionalize against other users who then become enemies, and that's bad. But then, on yet another hand, if "old-guard users" and administrators are too heavyhanded in arguing against or deleting or banning userboxes, users will obviously start identifying admins and anti-userbox users as the enemy, and that's even worse. I'm not posting this message to claim I have an easy answer to the userbox problem, or to any other hard community problem. I'm not posting this to claim that Clay Shirky Is Right about Everything. But I do think that some of these community-related issues are absolutely inevitable, and that we cannot necessarily make them go away just by listing them on [[WP:NOT]], or asking people who disagree to leave. In many cases, we've got to figure out ways to accommodate them, while making sure they don't counteract the goal of building an encyclopedia. Steve Summit [[User:Ummit]]

On 6/3/06, Joe Anderson <computerjoe.mailinglist(a)googlemail.com> wrote: A perpetual work in progress? Do we never want to deliver a "complete" first version? Steve

Fastfission wrote: I agree, but I think we can make things easier for the person who *does* want something relatively stable, either to read or to print up in books, without compromising the in-progress nature of the work. There are already people who can, for certain classes of articles, tell you what's good and what isn't. I even know who to ask in some subject areas. If I really wanted to make a narrow, say, "Math articles of Wikipedia" book, I could probably hire 3-4 active Wikipedians to sort things out for me. I don't think it would be impossible to have some of that information maintained in a more organized way. Basically the questions that needs to be answered are: 1) Is this article reasonably decent? 2) If no, is it because it's being rewritten or in flux, and if so is there a previous version that's decent? For many articles, the answers are obvious to anyone who is vaguely familiar with the subject matter, reads the talk page, and skims the history. So we somehow need to collect that obvious information and make it available to readers and downstream reusers. The specifics are fairly tricky, though, and I think some software would be required. I'd be willing to help out on that, but I don't have the free time or expertise to design and implement such a system myself (or I would've done it by now). Any ideas on how to get something like that jumpstarted? -Mark

On 6/3/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: In my mind it should always be possible to take everything from the article namespace (substituting in all the images and templates), throw away everything from all the other namespaces, and be left with what could legitimately be called "an encyclopedia". I think that's a good compromise between immediatism and eventualism, though I suppose it leans fairly heavily toward immediatism (I favor immediately removing unsourced assertions from the article namespace). Everything else (i.e., everything in all the other namespaces) *should* be reasonably related to the goal of improving "the encyclopedia" as I just defined, but I tend to take a view that this rule need not be very strictly enforced. I think it's especially important when removing content that might be useful to some other project to first give others a chance to export/import it. Anthony

Steve Bennett wrote: Well, IMO we should certainly keep the main working copy a perpetual work in progress, unless we expect that there will come a time when we've finished producing the perfect encyclopedia to which no improvements can be made. That doesn't preclude, of course, occasionally forking off "release" versions that get polished up and sent out into the world, much like is done in the free-software world. -Mark

Functionally speaking Wikipedia (as a website running a wiki and all of its little rules and so forth) is a project to create an encyclopedia (a bunch of text and images licensed under the GFDL). It is also a website where you can view said encyclopedia as well. When people say, "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia," what they mean is, "Wikipedia, as a project, is primarily to develop an encyclopedia, and not a group of links, and not a list of all information in the world, and not etc. etc. etc." They are referring to the goals and the prioirities and drawing up lines between what the goal of the project is and is not. I don't think one can take the division between content and method as being very rigid in this case. The content is unavoidably a direct result of our method (and it shows, for better or worse), and that remains the case even when you port it into another context (whether one takes this to mean in terms of quality, style, appearance, conventions, or even just a statement about the licensing scheme, it still follows). This is part of the reason I am very wary when people try to draw very strict boundaries. Sociologists call this "boundary-work" (we have an entry on it, for the curious), and recognize that while such line-creating and line-drawing usually is done in the interest of "method", it has obvious and often conscious effect on things like "content" as well. (Usually this sort of analysis is done on the struggles to delineate "science" and "non-science", or "science" and "politics".) Which is not to say that we can't have rules which enforce certain distinctions, and is not to say that all forms of "community" are equal or positive, but that we should be concerned more with the net effect than the semantics of the rules, and be very conscious that much of what benefits "community" will also benefit "the encyclopedia". As an analog, there have been a number of studies which have convincingly argued that regulatory frameworks work better when there is no pretense that the line between "science" and "politics" is going to be murky in such situations. In contexts where the distinction is perceived to be not only rigid, but necessary, the entire process usually gets broken down over pointless and endless debates and accusations. (Hence regulatory debates in the EU are relatively smooth affairs in comparison with the US, whose system is set up in a way which encourages controversy rather than compromise). FF On 6/3/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Anthony DiPierro wrote: Historically, Meta was the place where a lot of "community" stuff happened. At some point (probably the first half of 2005) things which would normally have been transwikied to meta: started appearing in the Wikipedia: namespace, and staying there. -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

Joe Anderson wrote: I think lack of single login (and particularly of shared watchlists), combined with the disproportionate growth of Wikipedia (and particularly of the English Wikipedia), is probably one of the major causes of this. I can keep track of what's going on in Wikipedia, or at least in the areas I frequent or have frequented, by looking at my watchlist. But I have no idea what's going on at meta unless I load up my watchlist there in a separate tab -- and in any case, since I so rarely go there, I only have a handful of pages watched there (mostly administrative or technical project pages) and don't really know where most of the discussion is going on. There are other technical and social reasons too, of course. But I think that's a big one. -- Ilmari Karonen