I read The death of Wikipedia by Nicholas Carr telling the story of the death of Wikipedia. I have as many know been critical about the Wikipedia, which is a great construct, yet surprisingly very few realise that any review systems will need hierachies within the community.
I guess I will settle with once again citing Clay Shirky from one of his speeches The Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which by the way should be read by anyone that calls themselves experts or developers of social software.
Now, this story has been written many times. It’s actually frustrating to see how many times it’s been written. You’d hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn’t happen is other people don’t read it.
The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is “learning from experience.” But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That’s not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.”
I guess very few people do their homework… My answer on whether the wikipedia is dead or not is yes, but might get another life when people start doing their homework on how to create cpommunity driven software.
The only “social software packages” I have seen so far that has created a community feeling yet does not fall into the pitfalls are developed by the organization Barnraiser. Why? Because it is built for real people by people, who have done their homework.
