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daI'm a fan of Wikipedia. There are huge volumes of information on subjects I can get drawn into, and I could easily become lost for days learning about the world's longest aqueducts, unicode layouts for Linear-B (which is an ancestor of Greek with 200 characters; some phonetic, some pictographic), or various artists I'd otherwise never read about. So many volunteer-hours worth of writing, it makes my head spin thinking about it. There are occasional articles that make me wince at how bad they are, and I often have to fight the urge to correct yet another thing here and there, just 'cause I can.
Yesterday evening was my first exposure to the Vote for Deletion process. An article I was involved with was nominated for deletion for being a vanity page. So I learned a bit more about the wikipedia process, which is sort of like wikipedia itself, in that any guideline will lead you in a web of other guidelines. Although it's designed so people can jump in and edit right away, there are a huge number of rules to keep the anarchy at bay (which might seem to encourage more anarchy, since there are people who seem bent on using the rules to do annoying things.) Indeed, it would be easy to be cynical and say it's all a thin veneer over an anarchy of people doing whatever the hell they wanted- just 'cause they could. And what more could you expect from a self-organized volunteer system?
But as I look deeper, I'm amazed at the number of people who are willing to do drone-work to keep things running smoothly. Maybe not 100% efficiently, but enough so that it seems to work out. It isn't anarchy, there is quality-control, and details get looked after. People are constantly looking at recent changes to make sure pages haven't been vandalized or subverted. There are editors compiling current-events. Translators for dozens of languages. Peer-review committees for featured articles. Watch-lists for controvertial articles that need closer monitoring. Categorizers adding meta-information to articles so you can find things systematically. And on, and on.
For each of these maintenance tasks, there are a dozen or a hundred people whose best idea of something fun to do right now is just exactly that. (This evening's discovery was that even place-holder "stub" articles get meta-information applied. The committee for defining and applying meta-information for stubs has 100 members.)
I can't say how happy this makes me- and would still make me, if suddenly tomorrow, everybody who wastes an hour at work on wikipedia got fired for misusing company resources and the whole thing collapsed. Because it is a succsss-story in diversity and cooperation. Where the product is awesome, but the process is pretty cool too.
Yesterday evening was my first exposure to the Vote for Deletion process. An article I was involved with was nominated for deletion for being a vanity page. So I learned a bit more about the wikipedia process, which is sort of like wikipedia itself, in that any guideline will lead you in a web of other guidelines. Although it's designed so people can jump in and edit right away, there are a huge number of rules to keep the anarchy at bay (which might seem to encourage more anarchy, since there are people who seem bent on using the rules to do annoying things.) Indeed, it would be easy to be cynical and say it's all a thin veneer over an anarchy of people doing whatever the hell they wanted- just 'cause they could. And what more could you expect from a self-organized volunteer system?
But as I look deeper, I'm amazed at the number of people who are willing to do drone-work to keep things running smoothly. Maybe not 100% efficiently, but enough so that it seems to work out. It isn't anarchy, there is quality-control, and details get looked after. People are constantly looking at recent changes to make sure pages haven't been vandalized or subverted. There are editors compiling current-events. Translators for dozens of languages. Peer-review committees for featured articles. Watch-lists for controvertial articles that need closer monitoring. Categorizers adding meta-information to articles so you can find things systematically. And on, and on.
For each of these maintenance tasks, there are a dozen or a hundred people whose best idea of something fun to do right now is just exactly that. (This evening's discovery was that even place-holder "stub" articles get meta-information applied. The committee for defining and applying meta-information for stubs has 100 members.)
I can't say how happy this makes me- and would still make me, if suddenly tomorrow, everybody who wastes an hour at work on wikipedia got fired for misusing company resources and the whole thing collapsed. Because it is a succsss-story in diversity and cooperation. Where the product is awesome, but the process is pretty cool too.
