On Apr 14, 2005, at 7:38 AM, Faraaz Damji wrote:
I disagree. I've found most people to be kind and helpful. Something like Wikipedia tends to draw people of a different intellectual and moral level than most other environments, and I think that a lot of editors have come to value that. If you think that there are serious problems with Wikipedia, there's nothing stopping you from starting another wiki encyclopedia with Wikipedia's content since everything is GFDL'd.
Of course the people who are left are happy, it is selection in action. However, in about 2 years when growth rates on en have flattened off it will be very visible, the pove growth curve will have long since outstripped the wikipedian growth curve. At that point it will be noticeable to the outside world and it will be your competition that notices it. Right now, of course, everyone is drunk on growth rates and ever argument is ended by "I'm happy" and "look how fast we are growing, clearly people are happy". This has happened before to numerous internet communities - intoxication on the flood of eyeballs.
However, that flood of eyeballs and the link equity they bring are a thing of value, and people will figure out how to hack the rules to extract, rather than increase, the link equity. This is already happening, and the active voting majority on most issues is on making it easier to extract value from wikipedia. That means you have about 2 years before the community itself is noticeably degraded, and your competitors will cheerfully point out how wikipedia is crashing and burning, and cheerfully document the articles which have outrageous bias, omissions of fact, and are run by people who in the outside world would be called "fruit loops".
It will be at that point - too late - that "something" will be done about it, but by then someone else will have set up a competing medium, and will be earnestly promising that he won't make the same mistakes that wikipedia made.
This cycle takes time, and there is still ample time to do something about it, but nothing will be done about it, because the leadership of the community is confusing people pouring in, with sustainability.