On 9/9/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)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