Can Wikipedia Teach Us All How To Just Get Along?

Ponca City writes "Alexis Madrigal writes in the Atlantic that for all its warts, Wikipedia has been able to retain a generally productive and civil culture. According to Joseph Reagle, who wrote his PhD dissertation on the history and culture of Wikipedia, members of Wikipedia actively work to maintain neutrality, even if that's sometimes nearly impossible. The community has a specific approach to people designed to promote basic civility and consensus decision-making. The number one rule is 'assume good faith,' and the rest of the site's rules are largely extensions of kindergarten etiquette. The idea is that to find consensus, you must see your opponents as people like yourself. Keeping an open perspective on both knowledge claims and other contributors creates an extraordinary collaborative potential, Reagle says. The features of the software help, too. It's easier to be relaxed about newcomers' editing or changes being made when you can hit the revert button and restore what came before. 'Like Wikipedia itself, which seems to tap our natural urge to correct things that we think are wrong, maybe our politics will self-correct,' writes Madrigal. 'Maybe this period of extra nasty divisiveness in politics will push us out of the USENET phase and into a productive period of Wikipedian civility.'"

Comments

Re:I agree

[hedwards]

Can't get enough of that Derry air?

Re:Really? I think this is the obligatory answer.

[cinderellamanson]

In common usage there is no difference.

Slashdot, though is different, because it is filled pedantic fucking comedians who often go without sleep, survive on caffeine, live in a basement or garage where they are plugged into the internet 24 fucking hours a fucking day, so the probability of some dickwad inventing a difference and some fuckwad using it on someone approaches certitude the way Captain Kirk approaches FTL or green babes.

Now, back to the article, which i did not fucking read, in which case I would be a dickwad (a fuckwad having read the article), which is about wikipedia. Fuck wikipedia.

here's the heirarchy of social media as I understand it.

We'll start with wikipedia.

wikipedia

This is proof of wiki software as a longterm content management system.

wikipedia
myspace

here we see that wiki software is very good for managing consensus software and myspace is good for managing music, blogs and people.

wikipedia
myspace
twitter
facebook

Phone support and real names. I think I'll label them for now.

wikipedia - ivory tower
myspace - rock concert
twitter - text messages
facebook - phonebook? - with pictures.
youtube - videos

You know what I think would be cool?

nasa - control your very own little robots on mars.

Anyways. Where were we? Oh yea.

slashdot - ???

hmm.

slashdot - basement dweller
slashdot - virgin
slashdot - geek
slashdot - nerd
slashdot - dickwad
slashdot - fuckwad
slashdot - *nix user
slashdot - wait that's it.

Slashdot is basically a Unix user's social networking site.

Wikipedia is a Unix run system.