Usability Yes. Social Features, Uh-Oh.

It's definitely something we're discussing, and your concern is something that is raised by a lot of people.

Do you have any ideas to curb the negative effects, while protecting/promoting the positive?

Well, as I said, it looks to me that this should be discussed per proposed "social feature", in relationship to the characters of that particular feature. The logical thing to do would be to deal with this social feature by social feature. Actually, in-depth experience with that particular social feature in another environment would be very useful in identifying potential disavantages. - Brya 05:14, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Like I said, we've been discussing the disadvantages of groups on social networking. You only have to look at some of the groups in the "beliefs and causes" column to understand what it would mean for Wikimedia projects:

• "Official Petition To Remove 'F**k the Troops' Groups"
• "FACEBOOK: STOP ALLOWING GROUPS THAT MOCK SPECIAL NEEDS AND DISABILITIES"
• "Groups called 'FUCK BULGARIA' to be REMOVED from facebook"

It's not just the vulgarity or incivility. It's the advocacy -- there groups are organized around identity, politics, and ethnicity. Even if the groups were to use more civil language, it's not likely that it would lead to the improvement of content or community. You'd have subcommunities that are organized to "fight back" against other groups, and use their strength in numbers to overwhelm normal discussion and "win" the argument. Equally as bad would be if Wikipedia divide into "pro" and "anti" groups, and the groups turn every article into a battleground.

We don't want groups to become rally points so that editors can organize a cabal with a common point of view. We want groups to be more like Wikiprojects, where editors of many points of view discuss and arrive at a consensus.