Jimmy Wales responds to Amy Bruckman

I think we need to talk about PROCESS as much as product. Or to phrase it another way, I would much rather see folks spending four hours a day writing interactive fiction (even if it's truly dreadful stuff!) than the same amount of time playing World of Warcraft.

I don't play World of Warcraft, so perhaps my comment is naive, but I am curious to hear more about why you would prefer to see that.

A remarkable thing about WoW, as I understand it, is that it involves social play, as opposed to simple play with a computer. What's wrong with social play? And why would we prefer people to agonize over bad prose instead?
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For whatever it's worth, I agree completely with Nick Carr on just about every last detail of what he has said about ideas originating with individual human minds. I think it's a huge mistake to talk about "the wisdom of the crowds" or "collective intelligence" except in some very highly circumscribed ways.

On the other hand, unlike Nick, I think that this observation is so trivial as to be pointless and completely uninteresting. It serves, at worst, as an diversionary tactic in the rhetoric against Web 2.0 - a killer knock-down argument against a foe who doesn't exist.

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Sherry Turkle wrote:

This reminds me of how upset so many of my students got when Wikipedia
introduced editing in certain areas. Some went into near-mourning.

As a point of possibly-relevant history, Wikipedia has never "introduced editing in certain areas". Wikipedia has always been open for wide editing in all areas.

But perhaps I misunderstood your point. :-)

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