[WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

Fri Jan 6 16:00:14 UTC 2006

On 1/5/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > I was responding to *your* e-mail, in which you first
> > introduced the concept of Wikipedia as a social club, and
> > suggested there were better ones around.
>
> Actually, that was Carbonite's phrase, not mine. I merely suggested that
> if
> people came here for socialising, there were better places to go. You
> responded, by appearing to disagree.

As was quite obvious, I explained why they might prefer to socialize on
Wikipedia, rather than on those other places.

There seems to be a problem with Wikipedia's community facilities, such as
> user pages, Village Pump, this mailing list and so on. They all help
> editors
> to co-operate, and a great many valuable editors take pleasure in dressing
> up their user pages, letting other editors know something about
> themselves,
> and personalising their own little space in a way that they can't do in
> article space.
>
> If all this stuff is provided and is widely used, then why start to attack
> people for coming here and using it? Surely the problem is not that some
> people are actually using the facilities provided, but rather that they
> are
> not doing a real lot of work in article space, and to my mind we are not
> going to have a great deal of success in forcing volunteers to work
> harder.
> They will either leave entirely, depriving us of potential workers, or
> they
> will respond in kind to the behaviour shown them by experienced editors
> who
> should know better.
>
> Is this plain common sense, or am I missing something here?

If they are here to build a great encyclopedia, and the social aspects of
Wikipedia assist in that, then that's great.  The issue I'm raising regards
the many editors who seem to have no interest in actually building the
encyclopedia itself, and instead focus their efforts almost entirely on
using the social and "webhosting" facilities that are, in reality, here only
to assist Wikipedia in its primary purpose.

Jay.