Forum:SH:Where Wikipedia Ends

I came across an interesting article in TIME that seemed very relevant to us here on Star Wars Fanon, written by Farjad Manjoo. Here's a link to the online article. It discusses a decline in the growth of Wikipedia, and presents different causes and speculates on the results. Most relevantly, the article discusses the aging community, and how it has deteriorated from its glory days. The article is not predicting the wiki-apocalypse, but rather presents several possible futures, and allows for some optimism. The importance of this article is that it identifies key problems that can bee seen on both Wikipedia and Star Wars Fanon, both long-standing communities that have become more organized over the years.

Here are a few key quotes:

"Chi's research suggests that the encyclopedia thrives on chaos-that the more freewheeling it is, the better it can attract committed volunteers who keep adding it to its corpus. But over the years, as Wikipedia has added layers of control to bolster accuracy and fairness, it has developed a kind of bureaucracy."

- Farjad Manjoo

"But once others had entered historical sketches of every American city, taxonomies of all the world's species, bios of every character on The Sopranos and essentially everything else-well, what more could they expect you to add? So the only stuff left is esoteric, and it attracts fewer participants because the only editing jobs left are "janitorial"..."

- Farjad Manjoo

"In Wikipedia's early days, every new addition to the site had a roughly equal chance of surviving editors' scrutiny. Over time, though, a class system emerged; now revisions made by infrequent contributors are much likelier to be undone by elite Wikipedians."

- Farjad Manjoo

Manjoo brings up three important points about community deterioration:
 * 1) Tighter control can cause new volunteers to be more reluctant
 * 2) It's more fun to add stuff than to clean stuff up
 * 3) It's more fun if your additions last, rather than being revised or deleted by the "elite," or admins and veterans

I thought I'd post this because attention has been called to the lack of community spirit on this site. The Writing Center, FanonProject and Alliance of Fanon pages have all been created in the interest of strengthening the community, with varying results (one could argue that the Alliance of Fanon was very successful, as it tied a large portion of the community together on the Mandalorians: Path to Glory project for a long time, and the jury is still out on FanonProject, but so far, so good). Wylind recently resigned stating his disappointment in the community. And God knows we've been looking for ways to restore the Star Wars Fanon community in other ways. Assuming these efforts will continue, we might as well arm ourselves with the awareness of the ideas presented in the article. --C3PO the Dragon Slayer 6,000,000 forms of communication 14:23, September 20, 2009 (UTC)