I don't think anonymity's a major issue. It's a historical accident (that could have gone other ways in a parallel world) that IP addresses aren't listed just like phone numbers. If culturally all users of the parallel internet took for granted they were identifiable, they'd still create blogs and collaborative crowd projects. The expectation of anonymity does encourage problems, though. If that's what you mean. But if that expectation hadn't been in the net's original setup, we would still probably end up with blogs, forums, linux, and other crowd endeavors, even if users might act more responsibly.

I'm also not so convinced about narcissism. "People do it for recognition and to look/feel good" applies as much to a job, a research program, charitable work, or playing music, as to online editing. At some level most endeavors have some element of self-image bonus.


No argument on this.

The smart mob turned into the riotous lynching kind.

It seems that groups of humans are different from crowds primarily in the assumed fact of anonymity, and it is volatile emotions that seem to drive crowd-behavior. Think of a theater audience watching a play. They can go from adoring to bored to actively hostile within a minute. During this time, not much high-level thinking goes on, since the only commuication the members of the audience have with EACH OTHER are sounds which primary express raw emotion.

In Wikipedia most of the "crowd" is watching "the play", but with almost no intercommunication at all. The email type of this is discouraged because mailing lists are discouraged and email only works if you have one (save for arb-l, which uses a mailing list to organize against the rabble), and there's no bandwidth for it anyway among the rabble even if there were 100 mailing lists. It would take all of USENET to really properly organize the editing of WP.

We handle this problem in the real world by forming working groups, and such (Organize!), and then listening to their conclusions. And at the governance level, all the way down to your city council, it's run by Robert's Rules of Order.

On Wikipedia the governance is much flatter, and is of a type which (as has been mentioned) doesn't scale well. The very idea of "concensus"decision making in a venue which has thousands of interested parties, drifting in and out for various times, is so laughable that only the deliberately-self-deluded boobs at WP would dare to talk about it openly. And yet I'm not sure Robert's Rules would work very well on WP, either "The Chair recognizes CyclOpia for 300 words, and after that, FruitMonkey..."

But hey, as we've said, the real world had all these problems, too. Once, everything was controlled by a prince and a few lords who did the local management and swore oathes of fealty to the prince, and the rest of the people were serfs and commoners. With maybe a lackey reeve to enforce the lord's law. We got out of the slowly and painfully, but never in any case I'm aware of, without at least one civil war. As WP repeats the history of government of the Western world, its civil war is still ahead of us. Let's hope we don't have some ugly totalitarianism-thing to get through, immediately after the glorious revolution. If that happens, people will (unlike in the real world) vote with their feet until a more republic-type rule takes over.

Not so much aligned against in principle, I am sure they are not, but aligned against in the sense that they are doing good, amassing public goodwill and not encumbered by idiots and filth.

openlibrary.org

Excuse me if they have been mentioned before. It looks to have genuinely positive possibilities.

Sadly, no doubt all the culties, pedophiles and military historian revisionists will find their way there in time, bend and break it too ...


I agree with the point that much is "just human nature" but the anonymity issue is the key problem on the Pee-dia and the solution is simple. Verified IDs in real names only.

Yes, idiots would probably still post pictures of their spunking erections and lover's vagina or butthole ... but the social Darwinianism of the workplace would soon cull them off as they lost their jobs. Pedophiles, bestiality freaks and probably even cultists would probably be shied off immediately, and at least half of the racists and nationalists too.

It would just be too risky for them ...

People definitely like their republic-type rule, but it only works if they have some idea what's going on. Wikipedia doesn't have anything like free speech, a free press, or even a widely-read community of critics, and they suppress the meta stuff pretty well.

I've decided that the most important thing wiki managment delivers is feelings of comfort and safety among the users of the website. That's something a dictatorship can do. We want people to edit articles, not to be afraid of it. There has been remarkably little civil unrest over at Encyc.

An interesting project. It is a sub-project of the larger Archive.org. It appear that the site's popularity went wild from early 2008 into the summer of 2009, but it has flagged somewhat since then.

Again, not aligned against ... more aligned with.

Crushing self-centered insensitivity towards other cultures, ineptitude and inaccuracy, and global domination plans.

http://www.joshuaproject.net

A Christian Evangelist project to seek out the last remaining ethnic groups in the world, with the least number of Christians, and beat them over the head into submission with Jesus.

Which people? Well, you had better get there before a local Wikipeda chapter is established or your hopes will be doomed ...

Again, not aligned against ... more aligned with.

http://www.unwords.com/ ... "Changing the English language one word at a time".

"Hey ... let's all get together and fuck up the google so all the misspellings and blogic witterings appear like new words!"

It works on the same principle as Wikipedia, only on Wikipedia the idiots are fucking up 'collective knowledge' as a whole, so all the crank theories, nationalist propaganda, bogus cults etc, understanding in general, and the academic approach in particular, are confused to hell with fact.

Plus the Wikipedia has a lot more free pictures of hard core porn. Thank god there is no picture of, e.g. masshole.