It seems my recent reminiscence is shared by a friend David Gerard, who pointed me in turn at Clay Shirky, one of Wikimedia’s advisory board members. As David claims he was, I was mentally nodding as I read through, as the patterns that are described for online communities are ones that I think I have been subconciously noting for some time, as I’m sure many have. However, the theme seems to be that things need to be done before a community is set up in order to avoid problems later on. While Jimmy probably envisioned that a community would arise surrounding the encyclopedia project, it seems unlikely that he and his fellow starters would give it much thought as that was not what they were aiming for. If only Shirky’s essay had been written a little earlier, people might start to notice the tell-tale signs of things going wrong before they got to the point of no return. While Wikipedia trundles on and will probably keep doing so in its current form, it could be so much better if we were to sort out a lot of the problems that the community faces. But either people are powerless to do so (and likely don’t know what to do either, like me), or those who do have that power haven’t got a clue what to do about it, however much they want to.

In the comments following his post David seems to think that the best thing to do is to put the developers in charge as an ultimate authority (something we don’t really have at the moment). He claims they already have a great deal of power anyway. While those who administrate our servers will always have the ability to “pull-the-plug”, for some it will cost them their jobs and really, we are not going to have a developer revolution. Yes, we depend on software to keep us going, and yes the developers control the code and the implementation of it, and yes they have a well-established cabal like the rest of us. But I don’t think an automatic shoulder-load of power to them makes sense because a good coder does not necessarily equal a good leader. Don’t get me wrong here, I have great respect for the devs and what they do (you have to be a really good coder or sysadmin to navigate the mess of our servers, apparently) but at the same time you can’t be good at everything at once, generally speaking. A technocracy isn’t fair.

The problem is that I don’t have any solutions to the problem either, and it seems no-one does. So people pull back from the encyclopedia with a “screw this” attitude into their cabals, they work away at either things above at Foundation level, they move to other Wikimedia projects to write dictionary entries or news articles instead (this is fine, but it may not be what they want to do), or they hide away with articles that get little attention and work quietely. People are only going to keep seeing the attraction of this, with closed mailing lists and IRC channels being so much more pleasant. When you are in one or two the outside community starts to look a lot worse than it used to, as you realise the alternative. freenode staff and helpers have had this problem recently as I describe here, because our own private communities are a lot nicer than the outside, public social channels. Unless we do something soon, more and more will retreat up and out – including me.