I believe that incidental collaboration — though unpredictable, and when there are few participants, is practically nonexistant — is something that everyone should be aware of, and when it's likely to happen, that participants should work to help it occur more often.

And this is a wonderful thing. People bemoan the loss of community that moving to a large city seems to cause. However, when you promote incidental collaboration everywhere, that means you're helping to grow that larger community, even if that community isn't viscerally ever-present. And the economies of scale mean that incidental collaboration increases as the community grows larger, so it's perhaps one of the best ways that each of us can foster a global community.




One of the implications of this is that WP:OWN and {{sofixit}} apply to the real world too. This means that the same anti-cental-broker menality of Wikipedia can sometimes be appropriate elsewhere.

This can be jarring to some people though. The above implies that if a circuit box is locked, there's something inside that's broken, and you're quite certain that you can help improve the situation ("be conservative in what you do"), that it's morally correct to bypass the lock (as long as you can do it without harming the lock or anything else). Many people pre-Wikipedia would consider lock-bypassing to be extremely anti-community, but the above principles mean that if you're very (very) certain that you can improve the situation (eg. that you're not mistakenly doing something that would need to be reverted... keeping in mind that reverting things IRL is not so trivial), that you're helping the community by bypassing the lock, particularly in cases where the problem would not be likely to be fixed by centralized authorities anytime soon.

However, it should be realized that crossing such "bright lines" carries with it a lot of extra responsibility. By placing that lock there, the person who put it there now assumes that:

• anyone who crosses the "bright line" is properly vetted (NOTE that good faith does not always equate to a good outcome — it's not okay to assume that good intentions are sufficient)
• anyone who later demonstrates problems when working within the "vetted-only" space can be encouraged (either verbally, or prevented via technical means) to no longer cross the line
• when crossing the line, they're generally trusted to first do no harm. When they do make a mistake (or if they notice a problem has occured through no fault of theirs), they're considered responsible for either fixing it, or notifying the appropriate person that something needs to be fixed.
• In some cases, when things are reconfigured, or maintenance is done, the person is responsible for updating associated records, noting the work done.