On 14/05/07, Zoney <zoney.ie(a)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