2008/11/2 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
There are many who seem to feel that using Wikipedia for socializing and fun is contrary to our mission, especially if it attracts people who aren't contributors to the encyclopedia. Personally, I think that's nonsense, and the community benefits from increased cohesion when there is fun and socializing to be had, but I realize that many people don't see it that way.
There are three issues here:
- If the point is that a part of the community doesn't want to have
social networking because of the principles -- besides your (positive) point -- I have one more (negative): We are not able to choose anymore what do we like, we are in the critical position and we desperately need some fresh blood. Even it may be not so obvious at the field, leaving this discussion for the next year this time -- may be too late.
Social networking features will not help you there. You can't move for sites with social networking elements. People don't use them.
Lower participation is probably a mixture of a number of factors:
Wikipedia seems complete. It is now somewhat unusual to look up a subject and find nothing.
Wikipedia looks complete for the most part. Red links are increasingly uncommon.
Anyone can edit hits a wall. Can anyone really add anything useful to say [[Tank]] or even the better known sub articles such as [[Challenger_2_tank]]? Most people are not going to see articles they can add something to.
People don't communicate a vast amount for a number of reasons:
1)lack of need. You don't really need to communicate to find things to do or edit.
2)People are tending to work on rather specialist articles so there may be a slight lack of other people to talk to. Lots of people can and will talk about the leopard 2 tank the [[Pz-61]] less so.
3)Information overload. There are still a lot of people trying to tell you things. People tend to filter them out and after a while that filter becomes a bit aggressive (talk page templates are one example of this)