On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Ryan Delaney <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Arguably we have the reverse of your reverse problem. What is the ultimate status-lowering action which one can do to an editor, short of actually banning or blocking them? Deleting their articles. In a particular subject area, who is most likely to work on obscurer articles? The experts and high-value editors - they have the resources, they have the interest, they have the competency. Anyone who grew up in America post-1980 can work on [[Darth Vader]]; many fewer can work on [[Grand Admiral Thrawn]]. Anyone can work on [[Basho]]; few can work on [[Fujiwara no Teika]]. What has Wikipedia been most likely to delete in its shift deletionist over the years? Those obscurer articles. The proof is in the pudding: all the high-value/status Star Wars editors have decamped for somewhere they are valued; all the high-value/status Star Trek editors, the Lost editors... the list goes on. They left for a community that respected them and their work more; these specific examples are striking because the editors had to *make* a community, but one should not suppose such departures are limited to fiction-related articles. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
