What really happened to Wikipedia

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Well, not quite.

Nice piece.

I'd question that the influx of money (which is still trivial - a few million dollars is NOTHING to run a top 10 website) has anything much to do with the processes such as the living people's bio policy. One is the Foundation, the other is the English Wikipedia community. These really are separate entities, though one provides infrastructure for the other. The Foundation is about 30 staff, en:wp is over a hundred thousand individuals doing things.

The bios of living people (BLP) policy was put into place after the John Siegenthaler incident, which was a wake-up call to Wikipedia actually being really, um, quite famous. (I've been on Wikipedia since early 2004, when it was Alexa #500, and I was really impressed by that.) Jimmy Wales said to the community "look guys, we have a moral obligation to get this right" - but if the community as a whole hadn't agreed with him, it wouldn't be in place. It wouldn't work and wouldn't be in effect now. And he was saying that as "respected founder and elder", rather than as dictating from above.

There's an ongoing media myth that the individual wikis and the Foundation are all of a piece and operate as a monolithic entity. This is a ridiculous notion - it's as if people's heads explode at the idea of a lack of firm hierarchy, so they make up a comforting story for themselves and think that telling as many others as possible will make it the case.

The community on each wiki really does operate quite independently. Volunteers by the hundreds of thousands do whatever they damn well feel like. The Foundation leaves it the hell alone for the most part.

I've herded volunteers in various contexts for 25 years ... Anyone who's worked with volunteers on any level - fanzine, student organisation, political organisation, sports team, small charity - will recognise everything about how things work on Wikipedia and on other Wikimedia sites in practice. It's cat herding - volunteers will work ten times as hard as any paid employee, but only on what they damn well please. So you need to work out the local value of tuna.

Posted by: DavidGerard   Posted on: 08/25/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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