On 12/30/10 10:24 AM, Platonides wrote:
Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
At some point, if we believe our community is our greatest asset, we have to think of Wikipedia as infrastructure not only for creating high quality articles, but also for generating and sustaining a high quality editing community.
So we probably need an employee dedicated to this. (I think? Arguments?)
He would be quite busy (and polyglot!) to keep an eye over the community of +800 projects.
Why is this a requirement?
If you think about the sum total of user-hours spent on Wikipedia, the vast majority of them are spent in just three or four interface flows.
But you're right; they can't be everywhere, so maybe there should be a guidelines page on design principles. We have WP:CIVILITY, do we have similar guidelines for software developers, on how to make it easy for the community to be civil?
Frankly I don't think I'm qualified to do this. I know of a few people are brilliant at this, and who do this sort of thing for a living, but they are consultants. Fostering community on the web is generally considered a sort of black art... does anybody know of any less mystified way of dealing with the problem?