Yesterday wiki enthusiast Stewart Mader commented on his weblog about a guest editorial on zdnet.com by SocialText’s Scott Schnaars which highlights an idea gaining groundswell in online communities as well as the AboutUs office – referring to those utilizing social networking tools (including wikis, blogs, etc) as people instead of users. The idea is more than a shift in terminology, but reflects the ever-changing nature of the web, from single “users” to vast communities sharing and building things together:
People, on the other hand, have names. People share ideas and information. People form communities. People, are the backbone of your organization and their ideas, especially in a crumbling economy, are the ones that will make or break your company. People, not employees and certainly not users.
Kudos to both Mader and Schnaars for their insights on this topic. While the idea might sound like semantics to some, it’s one that’s time has come. In computer circles, the term “users” often denotes something which it is not, as in the definition found on Wikipedia:
Users are also widely characterized as the class of people that use a system without complete technical expertise required to fully understand the system. In most hacker-related contexts, they are also divided into lusers and power users. Both are terms of opprobriation, but the latter connotes a “know-it-all” attitude.
This kind of thinking then perpetuates the user/sysop hierarchy (wherein users submit to the will of “all powerful” sysops), which we find to be a very un-wiki notion as well as being against the collaborative nature of so many social networking communities.
So, to combat this, many of us at AboutUs have been trying to eliminate the term “users” in our own lexicon as well as on-site. Astute community members will notice that over the last couple months many of our menus and boxes now say “People,” “Person,” or “Account” instead of “User”.*
There’s lots more to refactoring the language around “User” than a few boxes (and we know there’s more places on our site to change the terms and usage), but we hope it’s a incremental change that will continue to catch on – at AboutUs and throughout various web communities.
* If you prefer more specific terms, we like: “Community Member,” “Participant,” “Audience Member,” “Reader” and even “Customer” for talking about online personalities so much more than the generic term “User”.
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I like “Editor” a lot for wikis. It seems quite respectful.
“Citizen” is also respectful although a bit naff.
“Customer”, though? Unless I am using your shopping cart — ugh.
I like the humanistic touch. Someday I might get around to doing this on my MediaWiki installation, but since it’s just a side project and doesn’t pay the bills I have to put clients first.
Do you know of any lists of all the places “User” is used in the MediaWiki presentation layer? I might create one if/when I tackle this.
We only use Customer for paying customers, fyi.
I couldn’t agree more with the “people” not “user” sentiment. We at cc:Sync are rolling a new coordination and communications service into beta and have gone to great lengths to ensure that our customers are referred to as members and subscribers and never users. It is amazing how engrained the “user†terminology is in each of the constituencies we deal with-developers, marketing, investors, partners. Making the shift to members has caused a subtle but important shift in the way we conceive or our service and how we treat those utilizing it. A user is a metric but a member is someone we need to serve, delight and satisfy.
Hey guys, first off, congratulations on the recent round of funding. Especially in this market, that is really exciting.
Second, thanks for the link to my ZDNet post and validation of the ideas around people not users. I still find that, when I’m talking with my customers, that I periodically use ‘users’, but I’m trying to break out of the bad habits.
Finally, I find in my role selling Enterprise 2.0 technologies, that IT managers still consider their employees users. Users of virus scan, users of Office suites, users of laptops. When you get them to start to see their users at people, you really change their vision for E2.0 projects and it’s perceived value.
Man, I’ve been singing this song for years. Glad to hear some voices harmonizing. In the IT meetings I used to sit through, the word “user” was like nails on a chalkboard to me — and it was usually accompanied by some story about how dumb a “user” was for not knowing that My Documents lived on their own computer instead of the network, or something like that. As if it was their job to know that.