Wikipedia talk:Ignore all dramas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] in a mature online community

May I point out that Wikipedia is not 10 yet, so I gather the maturity is being measured in dog years?--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 23:48, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Has nothing to do with human age; think of an organism, in general. I don't know if you are old enough to remember Usenet, but it too had a period of youth, middle age, and senescence (and that's where it is now). Other online communities have their own periods of youth and age -- I don't hang out a Myspace, but I suppose that one too is getting towards middle age. Don't know if you're interested in a serious answer or not. Community dynamics I find interesting. Cheers, Antandrus (talk) 00:58, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I'd be showing my age if I said I remember bulletin boards accessed through the phone, and use of tape cassettes. In my perspective WP is a babe in nappies. I find more and more users that have not matured, so how can the community of predominantly immature individuals be mature? Community dynamics are interesting. Lord of the flies comes to mind more and more often, as are Orwell's works --mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 01:33, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't matter whether the individuals within the community are mature or not; the community as a whole has a growth, maturity, and death curve like a living organism, rather the way an ant colony has a collective intelligence not seen in any component individual (though that's not the best analogy). If you've been around since the days of bulletin boards, you should know what I mean about the growth and death curve. Are you familiar with Oswald Spengler by any chance? There's a certain similarity, except the scale is different (he discusses civilizations). Most communities have a period of pioneering and experimentation and excitement; a period of maximum functioning, followed by, or simultaneous with, an increase in bureaucracy and infighting; and then there is a period of decline in which the fighting and the drama exceeds the creative production. There are probably exceptions to this all over the internet, but I base this on my observation of the six or seven internet communities with which I've been closely involved since the early 1990s. You can see the same quasi-biological curve in a community of 14-year-olds as in one composed mainly of middle-aged adults (compare a trolling group with an investment club, for example). Antandrus (talk) 03:19, 2 April 2008 (UTC)