On 1/5/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay(a)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.