[WikiEN-l] Revealed! Why the community is on crack

[David Gerard]

I am amazed there are people who haven't read this:

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

The problem with Internet-based project is that they form groups of
humans, and a group is its own worst enemy. That's a marvellous essay
by Clay Shirky (who's on the Wikimedia Advisory Board for good
reason), and when I read it I was just nodding my head and going "yep"
over and over. An Internet community has a life cycle. It starts, it's
good for a while, it chokes itself or falls away. I've seen this
happen over and over.

The problem comes when the community is not an end in itself but is
attached to a purpose: it starts fouling the purpose. We're seeing
that on Wikipedia. That is, English Wikipedia's interesting community
problems are a wider emergent phenomenon than just Wikipedia or Jimmy
Wales having done something wrong.

(Woe is us when flooded with people for whom this is their first
online community and who haven't experienced the cycle even once. We
have enough trouble enculturating Usenet refugees and their … robust …
interaction style.)

Larry Sanger is trying to work around this on Citizendium, as advised
by Shirky's main source, Bion's "Experiences In Groups": group
structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order, parliamentary
procedure, etcetera. The question then is how much emergent bad
behaviour you can suppress without suppressing the emergent good
behaviour.

Shirky says "Constitutions are a necessary component of large,
long-lived, heterogenous groups." I've long spoken of Wikipedia's
fundamental policies — neutrality, verifiability, no original
research; assume good faith, no personal attacks, don't bite the
newbies — as a constitution, and said that any process that violates
them must be thrown out. The catch being there's not yet a way to
enforce that.

One thing Shirky strongly points out: "The third thing you need to
accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some
situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite
common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one
person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea
voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in." You
would probably believe the outrage when I applied the phrase "one
moron one vote" to Requests for Adminship. That, by the way, is the
prime example on English Wikipedia at present of a group that's being
its own worst enemy. I think it's worse than Articles for Deletion.

(And you'll see this 2003 essay speaks of Wikipedia as a project
that's avoided that one. Whoops.)

How to keep the community focused on the point of the exercise? What
level of control does one apply to keep on track without killing off
the liveliness?


- d.