Challenging cheap viagra pharmacy diet culture by focusing on self-care, intuitive eating, and surrounding discount compazine oneself with positive messages about weight and food may help. order estrace overnight delivery Polyamorous relationships can involve people of any sexuality or gender, purchase ampicillin online including only straight people. People can help treat constipation by price of atarax exercising regularly, drinking plenty of water, and setting aside a cafergot in malaysia time and place to pass a stool each day. Most clonidine tablet people can consume honey without experiencing side effects and use generic dexamethasone info it alongside conventional therapies. A doctor may prescribe this kind fda approved cialis of medication to either treat mild to moderate UC or lowest price cialis help a person with UC stay in remission by reducing zithromax inflammation. While all surgeries, including surgical abortions, carry the risk get cheap tetracycline online effects of heavy bleeding, an abortion performed by an unqualified person increases.

The Wall Street Journal (story here; subscription needed) reports that Wikipedia is losing editors faster than it is recruiting new ones. Since about the beginning of 2008, departures have exceeded arrivals in the corps of volunteers who contribute to Wikipedia and scour it for accuracy–or in some cases, opportunities for petty vandalism.

It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, and the Journal raises several possibilities without claiming it knows what is true. The original editors have been at it for almost a decade; perhaps they have burned out. Perhaps all the easy and interesting stories have been written; there isn’t much new to say about Crime and Punishment within Wikipedia’s stylistic strictures. (In fact if you check that entry’s history, it was modified only 10 days ago, but only to reverse some act of vandalism.) Can it be that from the standpoint of the totality of human knowledge, Wikipedia editing has now reached a state of diminishing returns? Also, perhaps, it is not so much fun as it used to be; there are more rules to follow, and more people checking on your edits, than there used to be.

It’s an important question. Wikipedia is one great success of crowdsourcing, of a useful artifact produced using the lunatic fringe of democratic participation. What if the model is unsustainable after awhile, because at some point there are more people who have their fun as trolls than there are as builders?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Social computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.