Shadow a Wikipedian, glimpsing his community
The goal of CPsquare’s “shadow the leader” series is get close to the lived experience of leadership, beyond short-term, drive-by views or our models of what experience should be. (It’s a members-only series of phone calls with “ground-support” in our online space.) We’ve done two series before, one with Robert Tollen and the other with Beth Kanter. In both cases it’s was interesting to see how the conversation evolved, how the leader’s thinking changed, and how those of us who participated made sense of what we heard.
This year’s leader is Davee Evans, who was an engineer at Apple Computer for a number of years, transitioned to design and usability, now is consulting with small companies around usability. His involvement with Wikipedia began with a 4 day rally to save a page about “Shambhala” from deletion. In retrospect, the page’s content was poor but the topic was worthy. Now, 1,000 edits, 500 comments on articles later, Davee is involved with a set of related pages. He’s deep into issues such as the different notions of “serfdom” in European and Asian societies.
Although participants in the process can be completely anonymous, Davee has found a convivial group with loosely shared values (around the process of improving an article) who have a mission or goal to produce a better, more neutral, and more all-encompassing encyclopedia. They depend on and cite scholarly sources that are peer reviewed, neutral, and credible. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.
Collectively, editors who hold those values hold “a vigil” around a topic, watch for changes that might go against their values. Davee monitors about 300 pages, checks them once or twice a day.
After our first session, Davee thought that the CPsquare conversation, reflecting on an interesting year and a new avocation, was very enjoyable. Interesting to consider whether the wikipedians are a community and to bring out an insider’s view of how it works. In the longer term Davee is interested in policies and approaches to conflicts and how they promote or hinder a sense of community. You’re invited to join us in that inquiry, which applies to all communities of practice.
At the end of our first session (on July 9th) we reflected on our conversation: our collective note-taking in CPsquare teleconferences — occasionally with different versions of the same sentence — is a group process for converging on the truth — the sense of the group. (Similar to wikipedia articles converging on “the truth”?) We wondered what it means when everyone is absorbed in the thinking and stops taking notes, which does happen.
