Fastfission wrote:
On 6/8/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/8/06, Fastfission fastfission@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:
- Users work mostly on the encyclopaedia, and spend some time socialising
- 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.
Social activity on Wikipedia is more than just "socializing", in my experience. I spent most of my day-to-day time on Wikipedia either reverting vandalism or explaining to people why certain edits are better than others. A quick look at my own contributions shows that out of the last 50 edits, around 80% were to talk namespaces.
Part of this involved fostering creative collaborations with others, getting others on-board with ideas, answering questions, etc. In the end all of this does have an effect on article content, but not necessarily a direct one.
Wikipedia content is decided by a lot of back-and-forth between users. Any time you have lots of communication, disagreement, contestation, etc. between human beings you need a lot of social lubricant. You need ways to identify others, you need things to put around your head that says, "I know about this, I define myself as this, I am a real person and not just some name on a screen, and you should treat me that way."
I've nothing against that at all. I don't see any great reason to try and root it out. If there are a few freeloaders who are just in it for "social" reasons, so be it. As long as they aren't using their userspace for anything directly nefarious, then who cares? My time -- and I assume the time of others -- is better served continuing my own business than it is getting into the business of others.
There are always limits to this, of course. There are definite mis-uses of Wikipedia resources and I think most people would be able to spot them pretty quickly. Copyright infringement on user pages, for example, is a pretty straightforward case.
I'm admittedly non-interventionist here. I think it is easier and more pragmatic tolerate mild misuse and annoyance than to waste time trying to make everyone into ideal Wikipedians. As they say, if it ain't (really) broke, don't fix it.
FF
People who are here to use Wikipedia as a social gathering place do not belong here. The community is a means to the construction of the encyclopaedia, not the other way round.
John