[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

On 27/02/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> on 2/27/07 3:51 PM, Gwern Branwen at gwern0 at gmail.com wrote:

> > If you want to force the community in a direction, then code is the
> > most effective way. It is not very polite or considerate, but it certainly
> > works.

> Your entire post intimidated me ;-) and bullied me :-) into reading more
> Lessig - thanks. The section I pulled out above intrigues the hell out of
> me; I would love to know more.


Developers have inordinate power, so it's probably just as well
they're uniformly noble-spirited ;-) They shape the virtual world
we're working in here.

Also, it's a good way to lure people into coding - if there's just
this one feature that would make MediaWiki lovely, then writing it is
probably the best way to get it, because we're desperately short of
developers.

(I'm trying to think of good reading on the subject. The Cunctator
wrote quite a rant about it in the early days of Wikipedia which is
still up on nostalgia.wikipedia.org somewhere. There's undoubtedly a
pile of academic and semi-academic papers on the subject.)


- d.