[Foundation-l] "antisocial production"

[Fred Bauder]

> On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 11:57 PM, Eddie Tejeda<eddie at visudo.com> wrote:
>> 'Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social
>> production. That's the conclusion suggested by a new study of the
>> character
>> traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research
>> psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70
>> non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts
>> it<http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16349-psychologist-finds-wikipedians-grumpy-and-closedminded.html>,
>> Wikipedians are generally "grumpy," "disagreeable," and "closed to new
>> ideas."'
>> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/06/the_sour_wikipe.php
>>
>> I wonder how the mailing list will react....
>
> Generally, my experiences are close to that conclusion.
>
> The problem is that even it is a close approximation of Wikipedian
> community, Wikipedian community is the best which humanity has.
> Scientific communities all over the world are much worse: openness is
> low, flexibility is low, vanity is high, scientific sincerity is
> low... -- besides the characteristics of Wikipedians, which are, also,
> characteristics of scientists. Not to talk about artists,
> businesspersons, bankers, politicians...
>

Yes, that perspective is correct. We do fairly well, comparatively.

Fred