QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 1:58pm)
The fault here is not wikis. It is possible to have useful, managed social structures in a wiki, just as it is possible to have a dystopic ochlocracy in a message board or in USENET. In fact, many of the technical tools needed to help combat the drift toward mob rule already exist and are even available for MediaWiki; there's a huge catalog of extensions for MediaWiki that Wikipedia does not use, many of them developed by other intentional communities to help manage their own community wikis. Wikipedia simply refuses to avail themselves of them. The big one, of course, is to heavily restrict or flatly prohibit editing by anonymous editors.
QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 8:33pm)
Intentional communities are built on trust. When those in ad hoc ochlocrical power are anonymous cowards to boot, you've got something that is truly unspeakable.
All intentional communities are of course built on trust, since their goal is cooperation, and parasitism, vandalism, and various kinds of dysfunctional communications destroy that. But high levels of trust must be earned, and this takes experience and time.
Kelly makes the point, which could use further emphasis, that a real shift in type and governance of community happens at the expansion point where you're working with members you don't know personally quite well (have a long personal history with). That happens as villages grow into towns and then big cities. Indirectly, it's responsible for a lot of town and especially big city pathology. If you don't expect to see a person ever again (your place is so large that you interact mostly with strangers all the time) then a lot of normal human community-building brain activity just has no input. The result is very bad.
Historically, the rise of the modern large city goes along with the invention of writing. This may not be coincidence, since there are some data-and-record keeping functions of groups of humans larger than a small neolithic village, and with rapid turnover, that simply can't be stored without memory aid. Think
Code of Hammurabi. In little villages everybody knows the rules, which may not even be written down.
As I've said before, I think the large human brain is mainly designed by evolution for one task: social information processing (Soc-IT). This includes all the substuff that has to do with reproduction, and at outside the family level, it has to do with evaluating other people's intensions, reputations, places in power structures, and how they can be possible enemies or allies. Who's the "witch" or "screwup" today? Who's more dangerous than they look? Who can stab me in the back if they like, and get away with it? The brain wasn't grown to 1350 cm^3 to solve math problems! Darwin was shocked to find communities of humans in Terra del Fuego who were nearly naked and had no writing and almost no technology. But they DID have a complicated language and culture, as do all human socities. That's a clue.
That's what the brain does. If humans don't use their huge brains to do several hours of social information processing a day, they invent artifical ways to get artificial input (soap opera, reality TV, and the like). But this, like a drug, does no
actual community soc-IT work! Outside of your day-job (assuming you're not getting your Soc-IT vitamins with office politics), in a rich Western society, you probably spend many more hours doing Soc-IT processing on
artificial crap (your TV, novels, other news, and net 1.0) than you do with real volunteer and social organizations, or in fulfilling civic duties like jury duty or voting or voter registration or highway trash collection, or commons cleanup or whatever. This also has become a disaster in the last 60 years, basiclly since TV began to clog our inputs and anesthetize us about loss of small village-type communities.
You can look at the loss of card-playing and bowling leages and community chests and so on, and it all begins to disappear around 1950, pretty much like our polar ice caps. It's due to SOME kind of technology. You don't like TV as cause? Okay, fine. I leave it to you to figure out.
Web 2.0 has the chance of bringing back some virtual community, so long as it unplugs the artificial one-way nature of Web 1.0 and TV. Thus, it's no use spending years earning a "rep" in some Second-Life or Wikipedia persona, if it's not a real one connected to your real identity. Most of the Soc-IT processor time you burned with other people's networked brains, is as wasted in an anonymous on-line community, as when viewers decide who to vote off American Idol. No help here!
With Web 2.0 we have some chance again to bring some of it back. But without connection to identifiable brains, it's just another MMPORPG, as has been pointed out.
Does going back to the way humans are evolved to live (i.e., you know a few hundred people reasonably well, for some years, and work with them on projects) guarantee that you'll have no social problems? NO! Even the Amish still resort to shunning occassionally, and it's very much like WP community banning. But it's rare by contrast with what happens on WP.
Are there consequences to not allowing humans to form communities of the type we've evolved with? Yes, dire ones!
Look at big city pathology. And look at the number of people whose only community is at their place-of-work. What happens when they retire? Do you know, for example, how many retired cops "eat their pistols"? Enough that every group of cops knows exactly what syndrome you're talking about in this matter, and has a name for it. People just aren't meant to take this level of dislocation and thive, or even survive.
M.