Tag Archives: nazism

Nazis and Norms in Wikipedia

Joseph Reagle finally published his book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (2010, The MIT Press). It has a foreword by Lawrence Lessig and praises by Jonathan Zittrain, Clay Shirky and Jimmy Wales. Wow!
The first chapter is titled “Nazis and Norms” and start with the following epigraph:

Show me an admin who has never been called a nazi and I’ll show you an admin who is not doing their job. —J.S.’s Second Law

which sort of resembles Godwin’s Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Note for myself: it is good to start a book with a strong, emotional point (in this case Nazism) in order to get a grip on the reader from the very first lines.
Ok, now I need to reserve some time to read the book by Joseph Reagle. A pity the book is not released under Creative Commons so that I could download it and print it straight away.