[Foundation-l] Growth vs. maintenance

[Andre Engels]

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 10:36 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:

[snipping lots of good stuff, which however would make this message
rather long if kept]

I think it has much to do with size. Not just size of encyclopedia,
but even more size of the volunteer group. When that group gets too
small, people get disinterested, but when the group gets too big, the
same thing happens. The optimum may be with a group of regulars
(meaning people doing edits daily or at least weekly) of about 20
people, you know everybody, and if you keep your eyes open, you know
what they are working on too. If someone new comes along, they are
welcomed, and if it appears that that's a "good" person (meaning that
they stay and make good edits), that gets you happy, excited.

Now compare that with the situation at the English or German or Dutch
Wikipedia. There's no way of keeping an overview of that. When I came
to Wikipedia (here speaks the real oldtimer), I spend an hour at the
end of the day to look through what the other Wikipedians were working
on, and then helped or corrected them a bit, or did some work on my
own. Nowadays, the English Wikipedia has about 80 edits _per minute_.
One can become a regular with some existing busy, well-meaning
regulars not even having noticed you. All in all, the project has
become unpersonal. Wikipedia regulars are as unable to see what the
Wikipedia is doing or influence it as the average Joe on the internet.

It also means that there are more and more conflicts. One will react
quite differently if the person with whom one is cooperating for quite
a while does something to a page one considers detrimental than when
someone that one just might have heard of a few times does the same.
Not to mention that most conflicts come into existence because _two_
problematic characters come into collission. And the number of such
pairs (and thus the possibility of conflict) grows quadratically with
the number of Wikipedians.

-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com