On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 3:54 PM, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote: > > http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ > > Warrens versus plazas. The former scales (writing articles), the > latter doesn't (the project space areas of Wikipedia, participating in > which sets you firmly on the path to working through your > eighteen-month wikiburnout). > > > - d. >
Now here's the interesting point: "High value participants are treated as special because they have recognition & reputation from the community. But, as the community scales, these social mechanisms break down and often, if nothing is done to replace them, high value members get especially miffed at the loss of special recognition and this accelerates the Evaporative Cooling." We have the reverse problem on Wikipedia, where visibility and reputation allows some editors to get away with behavior that we otherwise wouldn't tolerate. John Locke called this kind of reputation 'prerogative' -- it's now become a technical term in political science, but it basically means that when we notice someone making decisions that everyone else goes along with, we start to 'go with the flow' and accept that person's authority in future cases as well. It's a kind of momentum building of social power, and since it's the only real power anyone has on Wikipedia, it is very significant - and vulnerable to abuse. Where a contributor known to make lots of valuable contributions in other areas suddenly demonstrates insanity on a specific topic, people will tend to give way where they wouldn't if it were coming from someone they didn't know or view as a 'valued contributor'. The result is the 'evaporative cooling' of those who don't have that social power on Wikipedia, or less of it, but whose edits are no less valuable - if only less voluminous. This is a problem that is largely the result of what this author calls the 'plaza' nature of Wikipedia: where one has had a pleasant and long-standing editorial relationship with a contributor, you will tend to afford a lot of prerogative to that contributor, even when you see them engaged in disputes about which you know very little. You respect and maybe admire that contributor, but you don't see them from the standpoint of other people -- whose experience may not be so rosy. The Wikipedia community has the illusion of being homogenized, but it is not, in that sense; because every editor only has his fingers in so many pies, he can't know whether the rest of them taste good or not. - causa sui _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
