The other night my nephew told me he doesn’t contribute to Wikipedia much. He feels that all of the good articles are taken and he doesn’t want to waste his time editing an article only to have an editor or administrator revert his work because they jealously guard that territory already. I wonder if this is a widespread feeling?
In the the life sciences, the “carrying capacity” of a species is the population that an environment can support without significant negative impacts to the given species and its environment. A common example is White Tailed Deer population in the United States. In wild areas, the normal predator-prey interaction keeps deer populations in balance. In areas where people have removed predators, the deer populations can exceed the capacity of the local environment to the point where deer starve. Conversely, when the population drops below a certain point, the population is unable to sustain itself and disappears. Of course, there’s more to it than that. Modeling populations of organisms is a popular and notoriously complex subject of systems theory.
Perhaps certain collaboration “environments” also have a carrying capacity for contributors. This seems especially applicable to collaborations like a Wikipedia article where many people are contributing to a finite set of tasks (as opposed to a social network where there are as many tasks as there are people). If this is so, then there is a threshold beyond which every contributor you add to an Article actually has a negative impact on the Article’s community. Likewise when the population of contributors drops below a certain threshold, the health of the Article’s community suffers. Just as with animal populations, modeling this effect would be a complex task, since the “population” of contributors is very dynamic as is the “environment” in which the contributors operate.
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