The Limits of Volunteerism and the Gatekeepers of Team Encarta · Wikipedia @ 20

peter.suber's bookmarks 2020-10-01

Summary:

"Likely hundreds of examples of this kind of harm can be found a day on Wikipedia. The most common is what's referred to as "biting the newcomers," or hostile engagement with editors new to Wikipedia.undefined This has been cautioned against since the earliest days of Wikipedia, but if anything the practice is accelerating as Wikipedia's policies, procedures, and the use of jargon and acronyms for both grow like kudzu. It's an easy enough practice to fall into even for well-meaning editors, who tire at having to deal with the same issue a hundredth time, and even easier for the many editors who proudly proclaim their abrasiveness and, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams, imagine themselves paragons of frankness.undefined

This is, of course, another example of entitlement promoting volunteers to place their own personal needs over the health of the project. For all the triumphant citing of metrics by proponents of Wikimedia projects, one unmeasurable metric that is never cited is the loss of the volunteers who depart or never engage in the first place because of the barriers to entry, one of the most cited of which is hostile editors...."

Link:

https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/k3lmooje/release/12

Updated:

10/01/2020, 08:26

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.wikipedia oa.volunteers oa.crowd oa.negative oa.obstacles oa.incentives

Date tagged:

10/01/2020, 12:25

Date published:

06/01/2019, 08:26