[WikiEN-l] Steven Walling: Why Wikipedians Are Weird

[Martijn Hoekstra]

To an extent this is true, but no more (or less) than saying "all
volunteers are weird". And they are. There are bound to be exceptions,
but I find that with almost every single volunteer there is either
something mentally wrong, or there is something seriously lacking in
their social life.

I'm not really sure why this is, but I do have some ideas. One is that
people want their life to have worth. Society provides with a number
of things to do that. Having a job one is good in can provide such a
sense of worth. Having good friends you share your life with can
provide such worth. Most people do derive their sense of selfworth
from something like that.

Some people volunteer to get a sense of self-worth. Wikipedia does
this to a great extent. The overused Jimbo quote "Here, we are polite,
thoughtful, smart, geeky people, trying only to do something which is
undoubtedly good in the world: write and give away a free
encyclopedia" shows that is exactly what we do. We want to do somthing
worthwile. Now why do we want to do that? Because we believe our lives
wouldn't be as worthwile if we didn't.

Now I am not saying that Wikipedians, or volunteers in general don't
have good, rewarding jobs, or not enough friends, or whatever other
common mechanism for self-worth is absent in their lives, just that
they believe that their other means of generating selfworth are not
enough in some sense. Just that they have chosen a very uncommon - or
weird - way of gaining that self-worth, namely volunteering.

That very fact, that they have chosen such a weird way to define
themselves, makes them weird.

As a final note: Weird doesn't equal bad. We wrote one of the most
popular websites of all time. And all thanks to our weird way of
generating self-worth.

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>> This is beautiful and true, and you must watch it:
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEkF5o6KPNI
>>
>> (I have been at a pub with a trivia quiz where the table of
>> Wikipedians didn't enter because "it wouldn't be fair.")
>>
>>
> Thank God it doesn't reinforce any stereotypes. Oh, wait ...
>
> Charles
>
>
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