Wark describes triflers and cheats related to the game The Sims.

“… some gamers who play The Sims trifle with the game rather than play it. These gamers are not interested in ‘winning’ the game, they are interested in style, in details, in furniture, or telling stories, or creating interesting worlds.”

One example of a community of triflers can be found at wikipedia. As Aaron Swartz points out

“an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about.”

Although the ‘insiders’ probably deeply care about the goal of wikipedia I would argue that they can be characterized as triflers. These people have a highly intrinsic motivation for the ‘action’ of ‘beautification’ of individual wikipedia pages. The amount of work they do can not be done if it is not liked, solely based on motivation for some external goal. I think we can conclude that the triflers of wikipedia are immensely important.

Another great example of an early community is everything2.com. I have been extremely impressed by this group of people. They say it is about writing. And only about writing. There is no goal other than writing, but they consider themselves a community or even a family. But there are a lot (implicit) rules.

As the ranking/reputation system is mostly aimed at the the writings and not at the writers it is not a game with a competitive goal. Therefore, as with wikipedia, I would argue that most of the writers are triflers. They write because of the rules of the community, not because of the goals.

Considering these two communities I think trifling can be considered important. Trifling shows that people are intrinsically motivated in the action, their day to day (or moment to moment) activities. This type of motivation makes a community strong, because the action is personal and the interaction strengthens the personal action. Every trifling action on both wikipedia and everything2 adds (improves) to something else. (In this sense strong can be paraphrased as ‘this community will be around for some time to come’.)

What do you think?