Calacanis: Wikipedia “on the verge of coming apart”
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Though his post was about Digg, really, I found interesting some comments he made about Wikipedia. His point in general was about how these social sites can face very serious issues, because of their inherent nature. When people take advantage of social sites to advance their own agenda, it perverts the site’s reason for being.
According to Calacanis, Wikipedia “becoming a field day for flammers, haters, stalkers, and freaks.” And “The whole thing is on the verge of coming apart. It’s total chaos.” I doubt it’s really going to come apart, but it’s glaringly obvious that tighter editorial control is a necessity.
Peter Davis is a web developer, investor, author, entrepreneur, and most importantly a father. 
That’s the biggest problem for Wikipedia, MySpace, and any other large public site that requires user participation and has little to no editorial control. As soon as a site becomes big, there are people waiting in the wings to exploit it for their own benefit. They somehow need to find a way to only allow those who truly want to participate.
Yea, I think Myspace might just be a lost cause though. Wikipedia on the other hand, so many people are taking it seriously. I’ve been seeing discussions among teachers about whether to accept it as an academic reference. It’s kind of scary right now, but I feel they could make it into a good thing with better leadership. I think the part of Calacanis’s comment that I most agree with is that “it’s total chaos.”
Wikipedia is getting taken over by people with agendas, and they are being enabled by “open” dogma of the wikipedia leadership. If you enable and engage the haters and freaks the serious people leave the community because they don’t want to deal with the nonsense.
DIGG is just trying to stop the freaks and spammers from taking over by banning accounts and urls–good for them! That’s smart… protect the community, and if folks have a problem with it they can start their own communities. It’s not like DIGG is so hard to build… you could build a similar system in a couple of hours with the open source digg-y projects out there.
Thanks very much for the comment Jason. I think you’re right about Digg, it’s more like growing pains. They grew so fast, there couldn’t help but have some issues like that. I do think they need to show a bit of restraint, though, there could be a big backlash if they keep overreacting.
I’ve been watching the spammers more on Wikipedia, and haven’t paid much attention to the ‘haters and freaks’ but it sounds interesting so I’m going to dig (pardon the pun) into that a bit.