I have to agree with Russell about the nature of the community making
or breaking the quality of the result. Leaving aside immodest
discussions about this mailing list, I have been a member of various
online communities for a very long (Internet) time. My favourite
community is a mailing list that has been uniformly excellent as a
resource for its purpose - discussion of a relatively obscure Victorian
Science Fiction role-playing game, Space:1889. In my experience, other
on-line communities have varied relative to each other and frequently
not being consistent over time in themselves. The Rialto (Usenet
rec.org.sca) is quite variable in quality. Another community,
rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan, is usually high quality although
deliberately off-topic. The club-100 mailing list about the old Radio
Shack Model 100 is well above average. Despite my interest in
Victoriana, I couldn't stand the New Victorians mailing list for more
than a few days because it contained mostly vacant posturing. Another
Usenet club group, rec.org.mensa, is pretty useless, although not as bad
as rec.guns. Based on my experience, I tend to believe that the more
specialized a community the better the chance it has of higher quality
content. The purpose of the community enters into this equation
somewhere, in that communities aimed at sharing real information seem to
work better than those based on common belief or vision. This seems
quite the opposite of the classic definition of high performing teams,
in which shared vision is the key to success.
Based on these observations I would expect Wikipedia to be very useful
in specialized areas where expertise and interest are equally uncommon
but not nearly as useful in larger subject areas that may be
controversial. And, if you read the various articles, that seems to be
the case.
-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of Russell Standish
Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 5:03 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] wikipedia
I think the answer will depend on the nature of the community
contributing to the open resource. I have found on some email discussion
lists a highly erudite community with relatively little in the way of
ill-informed and idiotic commentary. On others (which I tend to
unsubscribe after a short time), the voice of reason has been drowned
out by a cacophony of opinion of those who like the sound of their own
voices but don't have anything of substance to say.
Locked
