hapgood:

From the MIT Technology Review: “The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.”

Wikipedia is often seen as the model of web-based collaboration, but it’s interesting to me that subsequent models have advanced different collaboration models that allow more ownership and individual control. Up and coming collaborative writing tool Draft, for example, is an application where people maintain their own copies of documents. Even wiki inventor Ward Cunningham is now pitching the idea of “federated wikis”. I don’t have a big idea around this shift, but it’s worth noticing. And obvi, the gender-balance thing must be addressed, here as in other technology-mediated effort.

Gardner Campbell also talked at OpenVA about ‘wikipedia as something impossible that exists’ through its behavioural guidelines. I was interested reading this article as it is saying collaboration with existing guidelines is declining so may be we need to look more critically at the guidelines it uses and at alternatives?