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Re: https://lists.purdue.edu/pipermail/citizendium-l/2006-October/000532.html
Larry & All,
Larry: Jon later suggested that perhaps we're trying to be "somehow exempt from
the
norms of the outside world", which is just completely wrong (at least,
about
*my* views). The problem is there is no pre-established way to apply
"the
norms of the outside world" to something that has never been tried
before,
at least on the scale we envision: to have experts collectively manage a
large body of encyclopedia articles written in "the wiki way".
What I wrote was:
JA: Yes, it's good to have a list of precepts and pointers somewhere,
but it needs to be understood that those are literally pointers
to a larger social context from which they draw their only real
validity. The idea that the X-site community is somehow exempt
from the norms of the outside world and will henceforth proceed
to rebuild from scratch is the very thing that led Wikipedia
down the road to a bad rerun of the ''Lord of the Flies''.
My use of the variable ''X'' represents a generalization from more
experience than I ever wished to have with a very typical sort of
scenario that I have seen repeated over and over, and it's one of
the things that I have been trying to call attention to under the
heading of "Unintended Consequences of the Community Metaphor".
It's a very slippery slope from "Sense of Community" and "Spirit of Camaraderie"
to Group-think to Cabal-act to Cult-drink, and the very first symptom of decline
is the thought that "it can't happen here -- oh no, not us -- we're brand new".
Part of the problem is the unconscious "autonomous" that the human brain tends
to insert in front of the word "community", as if you really constituted some
village that really could appoint your own "justice of the peace" and maybe
have real courts of real states recognize your marriages and extradite the
real persons that your "community" has declared to be "outlaws".
When you start to think that way, then you need to think about the day when
some real person that you've utterly and publically called a "troll" hauls
your "constable" into a real court of law and you have to explain all this
to a real judge without sounding like a Trekkie who overdosed on Twinkies.
Jon Awbrey
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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
citizendium development forums: http://smf.citizendium.org
http://www.textop.org/wiki/index.php?title=User:Jon_Awbrey
wikinfo: http://wikinfo.org/wiki.php?title=User:Jon_Awbrey
wp review: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showuser=398
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