Community

This page is about community, about interactions between users through wiki projects. Formerly this page opened with the question "Is Wikipedia really a community?" Now, the situation is much broader.

An early claim was that Wikipedia is not a community because it does not share body risk. The pseudonyms and IP addresses do not correspond to real people; it is unlikely a community could be built on virtual people maybe. Because the not-Wikipedia projects also allow pseudonyms and IP addresses, they have the same situation.

One idea for Wikipedia is to build a free encyclopedia together through the common goal of building a free encyclopedia. However, a community goes beyond the simple sharing of a simplified vision, and includes common community values. In 2012, English Wikipedia appears to have common values as well: assume good faith, no personal attacks, NPOV disputes, and user talk templates. Wikinews also has those four attributes, but not in the same manner. In not-Wikipedia, not-Wikinews projects, NPOV disputes and user talk templates appear to be much less important.

Perhaps Wikipedia and Wikinews are more like families than communities. One does not choose a family, but belongs to it. However, a family is a cultural idea that varies worldwide, so this paragraph may be incomprehensible to some peoples.

Some users remain bothered by the notion that Wikimedians cannot constitute a community because they do not share body risks. If we only consider those Wikimedians who are humans, we are all part of at least one community: the human community. Right now, we are all sharing the risks of being hurt or killed, by war, AIDS, or by poor atmospheric quality. In biological terms, a community is a group from one species living together and strongly interrelated. Communities cause a mixture of benefits and disadvantages; communities are stable when, over time, both the whole community and the individuals that make it up benefit. Diversity and communality both play roles in community.

Wikibooks is a special case. The project divides itself into multiple, autonomous book projects. English Wikibooks, in particular, is lacking a mechanism to repel new book projects that are outside the scope of Wikibooks, given by a official enforced policy.

Wikisource likes uniformity: a single standard Header template on English Wikisource introduces most texts.

It is already so. For example, we have IRC channel cloaks for different Wikimedia projects, and we also have "wikimedia/" cloaks. At least on Freenode, we can have a Wikimedia community.

• The Wikipedia Community
• False community
• IRC channels
• File:2004 WMF Election participation2.png image showing "community"

• Essays related to Wikimedia
• Community