[Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers

[Sj]

On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 20:00:12 -0400, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
> 
> >Of all the online projects I've ever been involved in, Wikimedia is the
> >most paranoid about power and money. I prefer facts to paranoia, and
> >progress to stagnancy.
> >
> While I won't entirely disagree, I do think the paranoia serves its
> purpose.  In addition to being the most paranoid, Wikimedia is also the
> most _successful_ of the online projects I've been involved in---I've
> seen quite a few other projects go pretty bad after money and power
> hierarchies began to become heavily involved.

Well-put, Mark.  "Stagnant" isn't a word that I normally associate
with Wikipedia.

As for your previous feature suggestion,
> "show me all new pages created by people who are not
> known either by me or by the people I know," 

it emphasizes an important point -- the best filtering features aren't
based on global properties that have been applied to a particular
*user* or *article* (this article has a Quality Rating of 7.4, this
user is Highly Trusted)...  since this implies a level of certainty
about the judgement of some users which other users may doubt.  The
best features allow the viewing user to choose whose opinions to
aggregate.

I think a mark of a good filtering system will be that it both allows
normal editors to watch edits by trolls, and allows trolls to watch
edits by their favorite antagonists... and allows everyone to watch
for edits by vandals.

-- 
+sj+