Not "trolling", but wondering if there is a different lens through which to view the present situation.
Let me preface a question with this: NPoV has worked spectacularly well on topics that are largely text book(ish), but it would appear that current events, which do not easily submit to text-book analysis, seem to be the attractor basins for the issues in play. My question is this: Is NPoV the right model for dealing with current events, particularly in the case of issues where *all* points of view, that is, as-well-as-possible justified points of view, are crucial to understanding the situation? On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Nicolas Jullien < [email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by > Marwell and Oliver > "The Critical Mass in Collective Action" (1993) > http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_ > Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsC&redir_esc=y > > which points that fact that after some times, project are "mature" and > need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in adulthood > (which is, sometime, boring) > > Nicolas > > Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit : > >> Hi everyone, >> >> I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread: >> *"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not result in >> even higher levels of bureaucracy? Internet technologies have certainly >> allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not >> so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably >> still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000 >> active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by >> far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not >> have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities >> like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around >> 2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy >> sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case >> basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become >> necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you >> want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would >> have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the >> current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise… >> *"English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility". I >> would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the >> WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper >> <http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=NEG_021_0021> on Wikipedia >> politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level >> of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important >> features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have >> any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this >> link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…). >> *Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities >> tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate. >> The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down >> <http://scoms.hypotheses.org/241> after 2012. This is not because these >> communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is >> way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in >> addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a >> rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these >> current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within >> the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly >> not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for >> women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up >> patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of >> home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on >> enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active project >> <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Aide_et_accueil> to greet >> newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed down an >> inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but hardest) way to >> enhance participation would be to make some global change on society >> (reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working time, >> creating a basic income, you name it…). >> >> That's all, folks >> >> PCL >> >> Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit : >> >>> Hey folks, >>> >>> I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really >>> relevant to the thread it appeared in. >>> >>> Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia. I'm studying the nature of >>> socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case >>> study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but >>> personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems >>> work & break down. When it reaches maturity, I hope that Wikidata >>> will benefit from what I have learned. >>> >>> -Aaron >>> >>>
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