Focus on the task is the work involved. It is only with great difficulty that a group can develop the skill necessary to deal successfully with the dynamics inherent in group work and get something done.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Bion#Basic_assumptions and his book Experiences in Groups. Fred > I get this feeling sometimes that some people are more interested in > building a "community" on Wikipedia rather than helping to construct an > encyclopedia. I tend to think that there is a notion which existed upon > Wikipedia's founding: > > "Always leave something undone. Whenever you write a page, never finish > it. Always leave something obvious to do: an uncompleted sentence, a > question in the text (with a not-too-obscure answer someone can supply), > wikied links that are of interest, requests for help from specific other > Wikipedians, the beginning of a provocative argument that someone simply > must fill in, etc. The purpose of this rule is to encourage others to > keep working on the wiki." > > I say this is not readily followed anymore, and I personally disagree > with that tenet, because of the sheer volume of the English Wikipedia > (almost 3.5 million articles) that will always have some sort of > positive article creation rate due to developing and new events that > occur worldwide all the time. > > Anyways, I think the reason why we had something like that in there is > so that we could preserve or expand this "community" of editors. > However, that implies that a certain level of drama should always exist, > not to mention that perfection is near-impossible to achieve (though I'm > sure many of us strive to do the best we can to improve the > encyclopedia), and that one's interpretation of an article or topic > being "complete" varies. > > That comes to my question regarding whether or not we are here to build > an online community or an online encyclopedia. Should we focus outwards > toward the reading/viewing audience, or should we focus inwards towards > the editors? > > -MuZemike > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
