How Wikipedia discourages community

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OK, a quick aside; I use Wikipedia frequently, it’s a great resource and this is not an attack on Wikipedia’s content. Instead it is a post that questions the communal nature of a supposed web 2.0 precursor.

I’ve evangelised far too much about the importance of community, relationships and two way communications, it’s the bedrock of my interest in social media. That’ll be the last mention (yeah right). The biggest issue that I have with Wikipedia is its huge barriers to entries (see what I’ve done there) and its arrogance.

Sentences such as “there is no way that you can accidentally damage Wikipedia” are patronising and massively irritating. Yes your online encyclopaedia gets over 684 million hits a year and has become a byword all over the world for information, but internet fads come and go and to steer clear of the ‘fad’ category you must have a legacy. That legacy should be the Wikipedia community. But does Wikipedia have a community? The mass of pages regarding what Wikipedia is and is not, what it does and does not and who should and should not suggest that it’s less of an open community for sharing and development and more a dictatorship that’s run by sixteen geeks in San Francisco.

A frequent line that’s preached is that ‘anyone can edit it’ – well, let’s unpack that shall we? So, someone writes an entry about me (it’ll never happen, but go with it), they write ‘Jed Hallam, 22 from Nottingham, UK’ fine up to this point. Then they write ‘died in a tragic unicycle accident earlier this year’, not fine and under Wiki regulation, I’m not allowed to alter this. Slowly this entry trickles over the internet and distant family and friends think that I’ve died and begin to call my immediate family – can you see what I’m getting at? I oppose the idea of corporate wikis becoming sales pitches, of course I do, but leave it for the community to decide. After all, Wikipedia is all about mass collaboration, not sixteen people calling the shots.

The upshot of this rant is simple. While there is no question over Wikipedia’s popularity and its usefulness, it is NOT an example of community. If anything it’s a negative example of how a community can be discouraged. When a small number of people instruct the larger community to follow a stringent set of rules that discourages organic community growth. In order to have developed a community and build foundations for a legacy, Wikipedia should have maintained the site, developed the idea and then released it into the community to grow outside of the San Francisco glasshouse.