[Foundation-l] Growth vs. maintenance

[David Goodman]

The usual solution to this in organizations and in human society more
generally  is compartmentalization with the concomitant development of
formal and informal links between the compartments.

At some stage, there also develops a need for centralized direction,
to keep the compartments from fragmenting and diverging too far. The
modern solution to this is some sort of federalism., As most of us are
accustomed to such societies, Wikipedia can be expected to naturally
develop in this direction. I think some such concept is underlying
most of the realistic proposals.



David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 10:36 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [snipping lots of good stuff, which however would make this message
> rather long if kept]
>
> I think it has much to do with size. Not just size of encyclopedia,
> but even more size of the volunteer group. When that group gets too
> small, people get disinterested, but when the group gets too big, the
> same thing happens. The optimum may be with a group of regulars
> (meaning people doing edits daily or at least weekly) of about 20
> people, you know everybody, and if you keep your eyes open, you know
> what they are working on too. If someone new comes along, they are
> welcomed, and if it appears that that's a "good" person (meaning that
> they stay and make good edits), that gets you happy, excited.
>
> Now compare that with the situation at the English or German or Dutch
> Wikipedia. There's no way of keeping an overview of that. When I came
> to Wikipedia (here speaks the real oldtimer), I spend an hour at the
> end of the day to look through what the other Wikipedians were working
> on, and then helped or corrected them a bit, or did some work on my
> own. Nowadays, the English Wikipedia has about 80 edits _per minute_.
> One can become a regular with some existing busy, well-meaning
> regulars not even having noticed you. All in all, the project has
> become unpersonal. Wikipedia regulars are as unable to see what the
> Wikipedia is doing or influence it as the average Joe on the internet.
>
> It also means that there are more and more conflicts. One will react
> quite differently if the person with whom one is cooperating for quite
> a while does something to a page one considers detrimental than when
> someone that one just might have heard of a few times does the same.
> Not to mention that most conflicts come into existence because _two_
> problematic characters come into collission. And the number of such
> pairs (and thus the possibility of conflict) grows quadratically with
> the number of Wikipedians.
>
> --
> André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
>
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