On 6/8/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 6/8/06, Fastfission
<fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Wikipedia is a project that thrives only because
people want to spend
a ridiculous amount of their time on it. Developing a sense of
personal identity makes people feel comfortable, feel welcome, and
feel invested. As long as said sense of personal identity does not get
in the way of the goal of making an encyclopedia, I see absolutely no
reason to try and quash it. So far most of the attempts to cut out
"social" aspects seem to have done more harm than good, in my mind.
I've never seen any plausible evidence that things like userboxes
actually get in the way of the goal of making an encyclopedia, except
in the sense that trying to eliminate them takes months and creates
all sorts of awful falling-outs.
It probably comes down to this:
1. Users work mostly on the encyclopaedia, and spend some time socialising
2. The social aspect attracts more users, who spend time in equal
measure, creating pretty userboxes and expressing their political
beliefs
3. This attracts more social users, who spend most of their time on
purely social functions and creating noise
...
Eventually you have to draw a line. For serious contributors to have a
bit of social fluff about them is fine. Having people whose primary
presence at Wikipedia is social, rather than encyclopaedical does
eventually get in the way of building an encyclopaedia, through pure
noise.
Social activity on Wikipedia is more than just "socializing", in my
experience. I spent most of my day-to-day time on Wikipedia either
reverting vandalism or explaining to people why certain edits are
better than others. A quick look at my own contributions shows that
out of the last 50 edits, around 80% were to talk namespaces.
Part of this involved fostering creative collaborations with others,
getting others on-board with ideas, answering questions, etc. In the
end all of this does have an effect on article content, but not
necessarily a direct one.
Wikipedia content is decided by a lot of back-and-forth between users.
Any time you have lots of communication, disagreement, contestation,
etc. between human beings you need a lot of social lubricant. You need
ways to identify others, you need things to put around your head that
says, "I know about this, I define myself as this, I am a real person
and not just some name on a screen, and you should treat me that way."
I've nothing against that at all. I don't see any great reason to try
and root it out. If there are a few freeloaders who are just in it for
"social" reasons, so be it. As long as they aren't using their
userspace for anything directly nefarious, then who cares? My time --
and I assume the time of others -- is better served continuing my own
business than it is getting into the business of others.
There are always limits to this, of course. There are definite
mis-uses of Wikipedia resources and I think most people would be able
to spot them pretty quickly. Copyright infringement on user pages, for
example, is a pretty straightforward case.
I'm admittedly non-interventionist here. I think it is easier and more
pragmatic tolerate mild misuse and annoyance than to waste time trying
to make everyone into ideal Wikipedians. As they say, if it ain't
(really) broke, don't fix it.
FF
People who are here to use Wikipedia as a social gathering place do not
belong here. The community is a means to the construction of the
encyclopaedia, not the other way round.
John