It is solved the way all large organizations solve
things, by
compartmentalization. The WP compartments, most of them, work very
well.
On 10/8/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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
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--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
The downside of compartmentalization (which is clearly what happens in
WP) is that you have a tendency to lose a single set of consistent
core values across the whole project.
That's fine in some things... it doesn't hurt anything I am working on
or interested in reading that there are people who focus on cataloging
episodes of the Simpsons in WP articles... and less fine in others,
where things like BLP policy, NPA, WP:V and RS fall down in some
corners.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com