I am amazed there are people who haven't read this: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html The problem with Internet-based project is that they form groups of humans, and a group is its own worst enemy. That's a marvellous essay by Clay Shirky (who's on the Wikimedia Advisory Board for good reason), and when I read it I was just nodding my head and going "yep" over and over. An Internet community has a life cycle. It starts, it's good for a while, it chokes itself or falls away. I've seen this happen over and over. The problem comes when the community is not an end in itself but is attached to a purpose: it starts fouling the purpose. We're seeing that on Wikipedia. That is, English Wikipedia's interesting community problems are a wider emergent phenomenon than just Wikipedia or Jimmy Wales having done something wrong. (Woe is us when flooded with people for whom this is their first online community and who haven't experienced the cycle even once. We have enough trouble enculturating Usenet refugees and their … robust … interaction style.) Larry Sanger is trying to work around this on Citizendium, as advised by Shirky's main source, Bion's "Experiences In Groups": group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order, parliamentary procedure, etcetera. The question then is how much emergent bad behaviour you can suppress without suppressing the emergent good behaviour. Shirky says "Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups." I've long spoken of Wikipedia's fundamental policies — neutrality, verifiability, no original research; assume good faith, no personal attacks, don't bite the newbies — as a constitution, and said that any process that violates them must be thrown out. The catch being there's not yet a way to enforce that. One thing Shirky strongly points out: "The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in." You would probably believe the outrage when I applied the phrase "one moron one vote" to Requests for Adminship. That, by the way, is the prime example on English Wikipedia at present of a group that's being its own worst enemy. I think it's worse than Articles for Deletion. (And you'll see this 2003 essay speaks of Wikipedia as a project that's avoided that one. Whoops.) How to keep the community focused on the point of the exercise? What level of control does one apply to keep on track without killing off the liveliness? - d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Shirky says "Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups." I've long spoken of Wikipedia's fundamental policies — neutrality, verifiability, no original research; assume good faith, no personal attacks, don't bite the newbies — as a constitution, and said that any process that violates them must be thrown out. The catch being there's not yet a way to enforce that.

One thing Shirky strongly points out: "The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in." You would probably believe the outrage when I applied the phrase "one moron one vote" to Requests for Adminship. That, by the way, is the prime example on English Wikipedia at present of a group that's being its own worst enemy. I think it's worse than Articles for Deletion. (And you'll see this 2003 essay speaks of Wikipedia as a project that's avoided that one. Whoops.)

How to keep the community focused on the point of the exercise? What level of control does one apply to keep on track without killing off the liveliness? - d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l