[WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

Fri Sep 9 21:23:14 UTC 2005

On 9/9/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> In all seriousness, I think DYK is one of the best tools we have for
> encouraging good new articles. Try as we might to downplay vanity, it
> is a cheering thing to see something you wrote on the front page; I
> try and ensure that as many articles that I write as possible are good
> enough to be DYKed - plus, as FF says, it's a guaranteed way to get
> people to come and edit your work, to link it into things you wouldn't
> have thought of...
> 
> Even if it's anonymous, we all like the egoboo of knowing people are
> reading our work. It's one of the hidden advantages of the wiki
> system, being able to see this so clearly.

There's vanity and then there's vanity. We can't downplay most vanity
too much -- it's one of the main reasons that people will participate
in a volunteer website! We don't pay people with money, we pay them
with personal credit and a sense of participating materially in
something bigger than themselves. Anthropologists and economists call
this a [[gift economy]]. I'm not sure if that totally explains why so
many people would waste their time ;-) on a wiki, but it's a nice
start at a theoretical framework.

FF