Marc Riddell wrote:
From: "Christopher Thieme" cdthieme@gmail.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:43:31 -0500 To: WikiEN-l@wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] psychosis and wikipedia.
I'd love to see some psychology-oriented individual do a case study on what kind of people are attracted to editing on Wikipedia. What psychological defects lurk behind the computer screens and the keyboards. Why do I ask? Because in the last month (including right now), I've gotten in spats, edit wars, content disputes, with people who would be poster children for narcissitic personality disorder and one of several temporal lobe disorders, respectively.
Something like that would probably explain a lot about the bitterness, control issues, the incessant desire to be "right", etc. that some people have when approaching the subject of editing.
Just a crazy idea. (no pun intended).
Regards, Christopher D. Thieme
An interesting (and tempting ;-) ) notion. The problem is, for the study to be at all valid, the person conducting it could not be a part of the Wikipedia Community. And, for such a person to gain access to the data, they would need to sign on as a member of the Community. Still an interesting idea, though.
Marc Riddell
Not necessarily. All pages on Wikipedia are viewable by anyone, with or without an account; same goes for the public mailing lists and IRC channels. Creating an account would be a good idea if someone wanted to conduct a survey of some kind (this has been done before), but if they don't actually involve themselves in any project work they're hardly "part of the community". So there's nothing to stop an "outsider" having a good look at things, except that the policies and processes would be unfamiliar to them, and might need a little explanation.
-Gurch