on 5/14/07 7:07 AM, David Gerard at dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 14/05/07, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is not a discussion forum, MMORPG, fan club or indeed primarily a community at all. It should not be run the same way as those, allowing the same problems. More particularly, it should be "run", not expected to magically "work". I think the latter is a rather flawed ideology, although unfortunately it seems many on Wikipedia subscribe to it (e.g. "the more people involved with an article the better it gets", "we keep getting more people therefore the articles will get better"). We don't even have consistent editorial standards as a result of this organisational strategy, which seems to be some bizarre belief in a magical "evolution" of management. I think the "Wikipedia:" pages put the lie to this working.
Mmm. A lot of the problem is that communities emerge whether you want them to or not. This is the tyranny of structurelessness. You can't declare a corporate culture.
Essentially, the "wiki" technology is fantastic for collaborative editing, but I think people have got carried away with it and erroneously belief that the evolution of content through such collaboration is a paradigm that can be extended to the management of the project.
So how to fix it? If I had a solution I'd be diving in head first. A solution that won't lead to lots of people getting up and leaving, i.e. making it effectively a different project starting from the same database?
This would be easier if forking and remerging were more feasible.
David,
Right now I am digesting the posts to this thread that came overnight (it was overnight for me, anyway) and am composing some responses. But, to respond very quickly to yours here:
You have voiced your concern about people leaving WP if certain changes in organization were to take place. That depends on why they were here in the first place. If a person is here to honestly help in building the project, I believe they would welcome some form of order to help them accomplish it. Those persons who are here for other reasons will find it more difficult to forward their agenda if they find this order gets in the way of that agenda; and they will move on to another online project to play in.
More later (I'm still working on my first cup of coffee of the morning :-)
Marc