On 7 October 2010 19:39, Paul Houle <[email protected]> wrote:

> There probably are thousands or tens of thousands of 'sharing' sites out
> there,  and you can't draw a clear line between ones that are "big
> enough",  the ones that are somebody's web-spam project (it isn't hard
> to make a flock of electric sheep that can beat the average Digger at
> the Turing Test),  and ones that are just too little to matter...  Not
> without offending somebody,  and in a consensus-driven organization,
> that's a problem.

As an example of this problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Booksources and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:GeoTemplate

(These are enwp, but I'm sure other projects with similar things have
similar issues)

These two pages aim to provide something vaguely like the
social-sharing links - in the first case, resolving an ISBN to a
particular source for a book; in the second, resolving a set of
coordinates to a mapping service. Both began with a handful of major
services and rapidly grew; inevitably, there were kludgy attempts to
come up with "most important" ones, arguments over how to order them,
etc.; and by now, both are pretty unenticing to use.

"Booksellers" is obviously a bigger pool than social networking sites
or microblogging services or what have you, but I can certainly see
Paul's point here that it's opening us up to a lot of potential
hassle, and a lot of fuss from people who have very strong incentives
to get their service listed.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  [email protected]

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