[WikiEN-l] oopsie-- mainstream journalists trust Wikipedia again

[Marc Riddell]

on 10/7/07 12:22 PM, Christiano Moreschi at moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk
wrote:

> 
> I don't know, Marc. Wikipedia is not a closed "community": it is such an open
> one, with people entering and leaving all the time, that it is questionable
> whether the editing "community" is really worthy of the name.
> 
> Obviously, some editors are worth trying to retain, but losing people is
> scarcely a problem for us. We can simply draft in a new population or two.
> 
That is a sad state, Christiano. Perhaps that is why the reliability and
consistency of the Project is so much in question in the larger world.

Marc

> 
>> Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2007 11:56:08 -0400
>> From: michaeldavid86 at comcast.net
>> To: wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] oopsie-- mainstream journalists trust Wikipedia again
>> 
>> 
>>> Marc Riddell wrote:
>>>> on 10/7/07 11:04 AM, Thomas Dalton at thomas.dalton at gmail.com wrote:
>>>>> Then the community isn't rational - that doesn't really surprise me.
>>>> 
>>>> Wikipedia is an emotional community - not a rational one.
>>>> Whether this is acceptable is up to the Community itself.
>> 
>> on 10/7/07 11:40 AM, Steve Summit at scs at eskimo.com wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> Remember, too, that Wikipedia is supposed to be a community
>>> second (or, idealistically, not at all) and an encyclopedia-
>>> writing project first.
>>> 
>>> The nice thing about all this emotional hand-wringing policy
>>> stuff is that a lot of the time, you can just ignore it (well,
>>> as long as you're not reading this mailing list, anyway :-) )
>>> and get on with the task of writing the encyclopedia.
>>> 
>> You miss a huge point here, Steve. An "encyclopedia-writing project" is a
>> collaboration of a community of people. And the quality of that
>> collaboration is, to a great degree, dependent upon the emotional state and
>> interaction of that community.
>> 
>> Like it or not, Wikipedia is not a refuge from having to deal with people.
>> 
>> Marc
>> 
>> 
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