Geoff Brown Wiki Experiences

GeoffBrown is a contrived name to protect the innocent. However the WikiExperiences of that person need to be preserved, in the hopes that students of Wiki Collaboration and CommunityBuilding can consider risks and mitigation procedures.

The original page started with an "exit interview" type exchange of views with a concerned WikiZen in 2004, and subsequently led to the birth of the WikiNoisePollution page.

All Material copied from real homepage into the next section, with the real name of the departed person changed. Last contribution Aug04

Geoff Brown has found that participating on this wiki is not a good use of his time.

Sorry to see that change of attitude so soon. Although you find a fair number of people with ObsessiveCompulsiveDisorder here, once you learn how to manage your own responses there are good stuff here, not necessarily in the statistics field. Also there are quite a few mathematicians lounge around here (I am not).
Your ManagementRoadMap is still much valued.
You may also want to look into WikiPedia, if you do not already know, as an example of the success of the Wiki concept (heard it did go through lots of painful moments too).

Not so much my own experience, but seeing the amount of hand-wringing about behavior and a few cases of ambush (snotty comments and deletes on pages I visited marked only by IP addresses in the logs). There's good stuff here, but it is like many potentially good but uncontrolled on-line resources - there are way too many externalities (that's economist speak for behaviors whose cost is born by people not directly involved in a transaction - like air and water pollution). There's enough of that stuff that's unavoidable to stick around it voluntarily - a little like wandering barefoot in a chemical dump.

Thanks for your kind words, though.

Subsequent contributions moved to this page

[I think it's more polite to leave silently than to announce that this is a waste of your time - and I think that's true in general in the rest of the world, too, not just here. There are problems, but no clear fixes, so it's not like this is a constructive criticism. Your observations about externalities, on the other hand, are interesting and potentially valuable.]

A wiki contributor begs to differ. I think that if he found participating here a waste of his time, well, that's a very useful information that he's freely sharing in spite of the obvious drawbacks. It's not like he tried superficially, he really did try to contribute and integrate here. Thus his observation meets the spirit of CriticizeBluntly and CriticsAreYourBestFriends. He is being bluntly honest, and I cheer him for that alone. -- CostinCozianu

You are an expert on the benefits of criticism. My main point was about etiquette, however, and no matter how much you disagree, I think Ms. Manners and Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt would agree.

A small DeleteWhenCooked advice, though: because GoogleLovesWiki, you may want to delete this page of yours if you leave. Otherwise, somebody google for your name may inadvertently land up on a page you don't have much control over if you leave wiki.

Those who agree with the comment in brackets might see InvestigatingVandals.

I read it. That's why I said "Your observations" - the plural was in reference to these two pages with observations about externalities.

WikiSpirit? says that authors have little control of their pages whether they stay or go, a good thing in general.

That's true except for the HomePage. It's a gentlemen's agreement that everybody has full control of their home page. If in this case wants to leave, Geoff could decide to delete it altogether or to leave a brief info, and cut all this discussion. A WikiGnome can also do that.

If a gentleman's agreement holds for HomePage, perhaps there is hope for the ideals expressed on the various pages directed to newbies and the volume of anguished discussion suggests. That would be a good thing.

See: ThreeKindsOfWikiParticipants

Further contributions in this section and below please

From above, the person explained it was "Not so much my own experience..." , but he felt the activities had nonetheless a significant impact on him, and his abilities to contribute. -- DavidLiu seeing similar activities in OctoberZeroFive

CategoryCollaboration