[WikiEN-l] Re: Recent goings-on

Wed Jun 1 04:12:53 UTC 2005

Phil Sandifer wrote:

> May I ask what communities these are? Particularly the one with  
> hundreds of thousands of members.

It seems that Skyring has ignored the opportunity to back up his vague 
claims with specific evidence. However, judging from his user page, it 
appears that the two communities he's alluding to are LiveJournal and 
BookCrossing.

Anyway, I'd like to take an opportunity to see how the "competition" 
compares, and whether other large, open online communities really are 
more "polite and productive" as he claims. First of all, I don't see any 
reason to say that the atmosphere at LiveJournal is any better than on 
Wikipedia. As with Slashdot and Kuro5hin, two of the other leading 
candidates, LiveJournal has its own well-documented social issues, of 
which you can get the first inkling by reading our articles about them. 
I don't mean to bash any of these sites - as with Wikipedia, if you're 
not looking to get involved in contentious areas, you probably won't be 
- but they have their own problems, along with their own ways of 
combating them. They may not be worse than Wikipedia in this regard, but 
I wouldn't agree that they're any better, either.

BookCrossing may have a comparable number of members to Wikipedia, but 
its character is too different for a sensible comparison. I mean, who's 
going to force you to pick up a book you're not interested in? I don't 
see how the community brings out the kind of passion that produces the 
disruptions we experience.

I might consider Skyring's argument more plausible if made about some 
other communities, including possibly craigslist and Flickr (notably, 
unlike the previous examples, their Wikipedia articles fail to mention 
whatever critics they may have). With Flickr, you don't have to reveal 
anything you don't want to reveal, go anywhere you don't want to go, or 
deal with people you choose not to deal with. While collaboration and 
community dynamics do exist, the site is not organized in a way that 
fundamentally requires it. And still, as their FAQ reveals, where they 
do have community groups and channels (similar to IRC), they have the 
same problems with disruptive behavior and deal with them in the same way.

That leaves craigslist, in my opinion, as the one realistic candidate 
for a more "polite and productive" community on a scale similar to 
Wikipedia. If someone knows more about the seamy side of craigslist than 
I do, feel free to enlighten me to the contrary. Presumably their forums 
can occasionally breed bad behavior, as with all such creatures, but I 
know of little else. It's also interesting to note that craigslist 
happens to be the only one of these sites we have not yet overtaken in 
terms of traffic. Perhaps we should take more interest in figuring out 
what lessons we can pick up from their experience.

--Michael Snow