Perhaps it’s time to once again create spaces where everyone really can edit, and to offer the aggressively pruned high-notability view of Wikipedia as one popular view into that larger space.

That resonates with the criticism of Wikipedia from ROFLCon folks and would probably make a lot of people both within and beyond the Wikimedia community very happy. Is there a place (like on Meta or Strategy) where a proposal along these lines is being organized? If not, perhaps it’s time to start one.

While I agree with SJ (and Steven) and your original premise that a lot of us are damn awkward socially, aren’t we perhaps overthinking it a tad? The cause of the gulf seems pretty obvious to me. After all, ROFLcon is, at the end of the day, all about the ROFLs. Based on last year’s experience, it draws a crowd of people who love jokes, who love doing silly things to be part of a community, who love using the internet as a medium to connect to others through shared fun (or shared mockery). It is notably not a conference about a lot of the other srs uses of the Internet.

And Wikipedians — God love us — dearly love to think Wikipedia is srs bsns. Things that interfere with srs bsns are traditionally not well taken — and haven’t been for years! — and are also in fact traditionally met with near-horror. I have watched in amazement and bemusement over the years as:
* every year people argue over whether we should have jokes on the main page for April 1 (“we can’t violate people’s trust in us as an encyclopedia”)
* BJAODN got, well, deleted (“it’s just not funny”)
* Esperanza and userboxes, per sj (“we cannot support cliques”)

etc.

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What is srs bsns and what we should worry about, as Ilyrich notes, is that it’s awfully easy to edit wikipedia and not interact with anyone — and by extension to edit wikipedia and not have any fun at all. I probably would have dropped out of this project long ago if I hadn’t met some fun-loving Wikipedians along the way in real life — I know and am friends with every person in this thread, and what you all have in common is a great mind for a joke, a shared enjoyment of life & the project. You’re all fun to do stuff with. What can it possibly be like for a new editor who never gets that experience?

I agree with sj that we could grow in new ways if we did encourage ways of being social that didn’t heavily emphasize aggressive, kind of mean, deeply argumentative ways of interaction. Maybe the rofl’ers can teach us something. It’s kind of sad that we’re the nerds *of the internet*.

With the Wikipedia community, one of the arguments the deletionist camp uses is that there are too many articles for the current editors to monitor, & the community must therefore be more critical about new submissions; the concern over biographical articles on living people is only one piece of this argument. Or to paraphrase the catch-phrase, the community is not scaling. (Being an encyclopedia-geek *is* an odd hobby, after all.)

Maybe this oversight is because I’ve compared the two communities in my mind for a long time, probably since I started with Wikipedia.

Geoff

An interesting question I think is, what could be the Wikipedia equivalent of “distros”? It’s hard to contribute to the kernel, but it provides a stable base for dozens of groups to build their own infrastructure on top of that. There is no Wikipedia equivalent for that at the moment.

Another dynamic is the increased “anti-social” ethic, which grew out of frustration with the early community with certain fringe types. By this, I mean not only the kooks but the incompetent who simply didn’t understand what they were writing about, none of whom took well to gentle suggestions that they might want to approach contributing in another way. (I have a few specific individuals in mind, but out of privacy concerns won’t mention their user names.) This led to the perception of two worlds in conflict, the “clued” (i.e., established Wikipedians) vs. the “clueless” (i.e., all of the other people). Things only got worse when the “clueless” became established inside Wikipedia: Wikipedians began to believe the project was going downhill, & began distrust not only new members but anyone they hadn’t encountered before.

That said, I believe the closing of the Wikipedia contributor community is simply an inevitable development. Look at the Linux kernel community: at one point, almost anyone who could code could get a patch accepted into the project. Now, due to organizational issues, it takes a lot of effort & political savvy to get a patch accepted by anyone who is not one of “Linus’s lieutenants”. This may take longer to occur in the Wikipedia community because there is no “benevolent dictator” (Jimmy Wales is more of an absentee landlord than a leader, let alone dictator), but it is happening at this moment. The problem is whether closing the metaphorical door will keep out the qualified who Wikipedia needs to continue to improve in quality.

Geoff