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.