DocBug

Wikipedia's defense

(By way of SlashDot) The Wikipedia entry on Sollog is an interesting example of how a community can protect a shared collaborative space. Sollog is a self-proclaimed seer/prophet, who a little over a week ago was the subject of a new anonymously-written Wikipedia entry touting his books and otherwise proclaiming his powers. Since then the entry has been edited, vandalized & blanked back and forth 194 times (several of the vandalizations from the same IP address that wrote the original article), put to a vote on deletion by community members (who decided to keep the article, though in edited form) and finally protected from further edits to keep it from being vandalized.

The part that impresses me most is the amount of work and calm rational discussion that's gotten done over at the discussion thread on the topic (and even pre-refactored version). I wish I had a metric for how much the success of an online community owes to the communication tools at its disposal (protection, easy version-handling, IP-blocking, etc.), a clear mission statement / rules of engagement and smart dedicated people, but I'm betting the breakdown is something like 20% / 30% / 50%...