People care about the fate of a good community site. Do fully engaged users form site-related factions? Tribes, so to speak. In fact, that can be healthy.
Even a less-than-huge site like the TeleBlog, without any pretense of formal governance—I consult as necessary with some regular contributors such as Branko, who may or may not agree with me—can have tribes. There’s the Anything Goes Tribe vs. the Ban the Rude Commenters Tribe. I’m probably closer to the Anything Goes Tribe. Of more than 600 or 700 nonspamming commenters, I have yet to ban anyone, although, in the case of one determined boor, I came close. In discussions on topics ranging from copyright to technical matters, our opinions can be all over the place; we’re talking about a whole collection of tribes, even though this blog is openly partial to causes such as libraries—and e-book standards that truly serve the needs of publishers and consumers. But what about the main topic to be discussed in this post: caring about the fate of a site per se? And forming a tribe to do it?
One of the best examples comes from the Wikipedia community. As a site many times the TeleBlog’s size, Wikipedia has a far bigger and more complex tribal structure. I can see a place for all the tribes in the Wiki-ecosystem, with one major exception, the Vandals. That’s right. A Wikipedia page called Conflicting Wikipedia philosophies doesn’t use the word “Vandal” per se, but even lists “Vandalism” among the “philosophies.” Talk about objectivity! Oh, well, at least Wikipedia says the related page isn’t an official one. Here, with the “isms” removed in favor of “ists,” are just a few of the other tribes:
—Mergists, one of the tribes I know to have its own association. Yes, mergists like to, er, merge articles. In the words of Wikipedia: “Mergists maintain that while the articles may merit deletion (or redirection) the information contained therein often deserves to be preserved.”
–The Structurists, also with an association. Whoops! This is one group I don’t see on the page devoted to conflicting philosophies. Is that an oversight, or have the Structurists lost too many battles? As you’d expect, the association says that “We support well-enumerated structure at every level of Wikimedia.” How ironic that the group isn’t on the philosophies page, while the others are. Can’t consistency be part of structure?
–The Inclusionists, with yet another association-propagated philosophy. They “favour keeping and amending problematic articles over deleting them. Inclusionists are also generally less concerned with the question of notability, and instead focus on whether or not an article is factual.”
–The arch foes of the Inclusionists, the Deletionists. The Association of Deletionists actually exists. Dels advocate “clear and relatively rigorous standards for accepting articles, templates or other pages to the encyclopedia.” I myself agree that Wikipedia should avoid, say, vanity pages, but perhaps the Deletionists are overdoing it at times.
Check out the clashing philosophies page for a more complete list of tribes, and follow the links for the full definitions.
Mind you, I’m simply talking text-related matters here; I can well imagine tribal life on a virtual reality site such as Second Life. Can SL’s avatars shed real blood? Perhaps Creative Commons-licensed photo via Flicker Taken by Kroo2u.)
I am a radical inclusionist. If there were a pill to make deletists go away, I’d swallow it. They can go and work for EB or the Digital Universe encyclopedia all they want.
Well, as I’ve made clear, I’m mainly an Inc. Fully agree with your thought above. If people are worried about too much clutter, let links to minor entries solve the problem. What’s more, there could be provisions for rating the importance of the contributions and letting searchers confine their quests to “Level 1” or whatever. Right on, Branko! – David