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

[phoebe ayers]

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Martijn Hoekstra wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>>
> Even worse, some are actually librarians.

ha! Thanks Charles.

What I liked about Steven's talk is (reinforcing stereotypes or no) he
was concise and funny about the fact that there is a big group of
people who cares, a lot, about working on Wikipedia -- and there are
reasons for what they do. I find that the idea that there are people
behind wikipedia is something most readers don't think about or
realize. If you are in the habit of thinking of wikipedia as a
monolithic thing that magically appears ("wikipedia says that..."
"wikipedia doesn't cover engineering well...") rather than as
something that's actually created by people, you might be less likely
to participate yourself.

And (stereotypes or no) personally I think he nails it as far as what
makes wikipedians what they are (I call it "wikipedian syndrome" in my
head). And this community is funny -- we are obsessive about analyzing
the inner workings of the projects and how people relate to it, but
less so about the people themselves and why they do it, or how people
who *don't* fit in with these stereotypes might join the community.

Anyway, the context that he gave this talk should be taken into
context -- Ignite Portland is a super-geeky series of lightning talks:
http://www.igniteportland.com/about/
it's a reasonable assumption that many in the audience were pretty
technically savvy, and probably had their own opinions about wikipedia
already.

-- phoebe