On 10/8/07, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
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@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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- 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.