[p2p-research] a challenge to social media enthusiasm .. what say you, league of noble peers

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/18/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> from nicholas carr,

> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/06/the_sour_wikipe.php
>
> The sour Wikipedian

> Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social
> production. That's the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character
> traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research
> psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70
> non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts it, Wikipedians
> are generally "grumpy," "disagreeable," and "closed to new ideas."

That's certainly my impression of the most active edit warriors,
especially the most fanatical of the notability hawks.

But it really doesn't matter.  What matters is less the personal
idiosyncracies of individual contributors to open-source culture, than
the social value of their contributions and the use that is made of
them.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html