[WikiEN-l] A thought on community dynamics

[John Lee]

http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_09_05_a_bakeoff.html

Gladwell's thesis is that although open source projects, which we can
probably loosely define to include ourselves, bring together great
expertise, but also create significant friction between the members of what
we call "the community". If I could graph Gladwell's thesis and borrow some
economic jargon, I'd say that there is some point on the curve where the
marginal value of the cumulative benefits and disadvantages of expertise and
friction is equal to zero. (Okay, I was trying to phrase this in a more
simple way, but clearly I failed.)

The question is: have we on Wikipedia reached a point where our community is
too big that the negative friction overwhelms the positive value of our
expertise?

I'm just throwing this out for discussion, but I think this hypothesis may
prove to be true in some areas - namely those frequently discussed on this
list. But in less high-activity areas, such as quiet (i.e. not [[George W.
Bush]]) articles, then we have a sufficiently small group of editors who
have space to think and bring their individual ability to bear.

Johnleemk