Perish the thought. People who say such things had better roll their own party sandwiches, right?
Yet Asher Moses for The Age (July 8, 2009) advises,
a study by Israeli psychology researchers found “the prosocial behaviour apparent in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives … which are not associated with high levels of agreeableness”.
The study, published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behaviour, gave personality tests to 69 active members of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit and 70 non-Wikipedians, finding the former “feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than they do offline”.
The researchers’ findings that Wikipedians were introverted, disagreeable and closed to new ideas is at odds with the notion that Wikipedia was built around community and knowledge sharing.
Feather, please. I can’t be expected to do my pro-gravity trick without the familiar prop.
The rest of the article goes on to provide details and to vindicate Australian Wikipedians as less messed in the head than others, and we must hope it is so.
Of course, anyone familiar with the intelligent design controversy will be well aware of the waste of time associated with trying to get reasonably neutral information posted.
To me, the scandal is not that the trolls are running the ‘pedia, but that profs actually send their students there for information.