On 1/5/06, Peter Mackay peter.mackay@bigpond.com wrote:
I was responding to *your* e-mail, in which you first introduced the concept of Wikipedia as a social club, and suggested there were better ones around.
Actually, that was Carbonite's phrase, not mine. I merely suggested that if people came here for socialising, there were better places to go. You responded, by appearing to disagree.
As was quite obvious, I explained why they might prefer to socialize on Wikipedia, rather than on those other places.
There seems to be a problem with Wikipedia's community facilities, such as
user pages, Village Pump, this mailing list and so on. They all help editors to co-operate, and a great many valuable editors take pleasure in dressing up their user pages, letting other editors know something about themselves, and personalising their own little space in a way that they can't do in article space.
If all this stuff is provided and is widely used, then why start to attack people for coming here and using it? Surely the problem is not that some people are actually using the facilities provided, but rather that they are not doing a real lot of work in article space, and to my mind we are not going to have a great deal of success in forcing volunteers to work harder. They will either leave entirely, depriving us of potential workers, or they will respond in kind to the behaviour shown them by experienced editors who should know better.
Is this plain common sense, or am I missing something here?
If they are here to build a great encyclopedia, and the social aspects of Wikipedia assist in that, then that's great. The issue I'm raising regards the many editors who seem to have no interest in actually building the encyclopedia itself, and instead focus their efforts almost entirely on using the social and "webhosting" facilities that are, in reality, here only to assist Wikipedia in its primary purpose.
Jay.