Wiki Victimization

Playing the victim is easy to do. We're all doing it. It's time we stopped.

Wiki is about the open collaborative generation of content. Anon is on the side of the angels here because, at least, he/she is collaborating on the content. We stewards are too busy taking dudgeon and naming names - playing victim - to do that.

We talk about the bad edits we perceive Anon doing. By any sensible standard, they're bad. Not as bad as no edits ... but what choice do we have?

The EasternWuss talks about 3 great virtues. Acceptance - which in this case means accepting all the folk who can contribute signal to wiki. Anon is one of them. Compassion, which here means thinking about how to enable thse folk to contribute to wiki effectively. And selflessness, which here means stopping defending the turf and starting to listen to the new folk who'd like to express new ideas here.

Wiki makes a fine victim. And it's easy to see the folk who come here as victimizers. They don't know wiki like we do. They don't know its history and conventions. They're so busy putting up walled gardens and injecting noise we just have to protect poor wiki from them.

I humbly submit that the worst suffering wiki is experiencing right now is at the hands of us, the stewards. Our conventions and powers are preventing ordinary clever folk from coming and playing here. We're preventing FromFertilizerComeFlowers. And by all piling on whoever we perceive as vandals, we're making the place into a gulag for the content that is here already.

What then? Should we throw the doors wide open? Let the spammers and whiners and vandals destroy the nice things here?

No. We have to find new solutions. The most obvious one, to me at least today, is a TidalWiki. But I'm likely foolish about that - I come up with a lot of nonsense ideas. Main thing is we need to work on actually creating and collaborating and welcoming new collaborators. Whatever their bent and whichever way they want to take it. Open wiki up technologically, thematically, and conventionally. Forget what we know and cultivate that BeginnersMind that made this place have content. Stop playing victims and start playing parents. That's the only way wiki is going to avoid strangulation now. -- PeterMerel