[WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

[Steve Bennett]

On 6/8/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikipedia is a project that thrives only because people want to spend
> a ridiculous amount of their time on it. Developing a sense of
> personal identity makes people feel comfortable, feel welcome, and
> feel invested. As long as said sense of personal identity does not get
> in the way of the goal of making an encyclopedia, I see absolutely no
> reason to try and quash it. So far most of the attempts to cut out
> "social" aspects seem to have done more harm than good, in my mind.
>
> I've never seen any plausible evidence that things like userboxes
> actually get in the way of the goal of making an encyclopedia, except
> in the sense that trying to eliminate them takes months and creates
> all sorts of awful falling-outs.

It probably comes down to this:
1. Users work mostly on the encyclopaedia, and spend some time socialising
2. The social aspect attracts more users, who spend time in equal
measure, creating pretty userboxes and expressing their political
beliefs
3. This attracts more social users, who spend most of their time on
purely social functions and creating noise
...

Eventually you have to draw a line. For serious contributors to have a
bit of social fluff about them is fine. Having people whose primary
presence at Wikipedia is social, rather than encyclopaedical does
eventually get in the way of building an encyclopaedia, through pure
noise.

Steve