"The death of Wikipedia" and "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"

The following pieces have much to think about for any social software engineer and service host. Both, I believe, point to where Philly Future must go if it is to remain a working community that still serves its purpose.

Nicholas Carr's recent essay, "The death of Wikipedia" is getting some buzz around the web for its subject matter and the blunt way it presents its case - that the ideal behind Wikipedia - anyone can edit anything - pure participatory media - isn't possible:

Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," was a nice experiment in the "democratization" of publishing, but it didn't quite work out. Wikipedia is dead. It died the way the pure products of idealism always do, slowly and quietly and largely in secret, through the corrosive process of compromise.

There was a time when, indeed, anyone could edit anything on Wikipedia. But, as eWeek's Steven Vaughan-Nichols recently observed, "Wikipedia hasn't been a real 'wiki' where anyone can write and edit for quite a while now." A few months ago, in the wake of controversies about the quality and reliability of the free encyclopedia's content, the Wikipedian powers-that-be - its "administrators" - abandoned the work's founding ideal and began to impose restrictions on editing. In addition to banning some contributors from the site, the administrators adopted an "official policy" of what they called, in good Orwellian fashion, "semi-protection" to prevent "vandals" (also known as people) from messing with their open encyclopedia.

Clay Shirky, whose writings have influenced me over the years, and his piece "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" got mentioned in his discussion thread as a defense for Wikipedia, but that poster didn't understand the point Carr was trying to make - which Shirky would agree with - pure partipatory online communities - where everyone has the same permissions, capabilities, and recognition as everyone else - implode past a certain point of growth - if measures are not taken:

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.

And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.

Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this. He said "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.