Daniel,
Thanks. This was the most heartening post I've read in relation to anything to do with Wikipedia in a good while. We chuckled, and it was balm on my wife's bruised heart -- it made her say, "It makes you think there is hope for this thing after all."
My reply:
You're welcome (and so is she).
At the same time I do owe myself an accounting of this mentality. Because it was once, briefly, mine as well.
Back in the mid-2000s, when both he and I started editing, the public image of Wikipedia was a little different than today. That was when a lot of coverage focused on the vandalism as a general side effect of "anyone can edit". And that was *before* the Seigenthaler incident.
Also at the time, notability hadn't established itself as thoroughly. The boundaries of inclusion were not as clearly drawn (and that's saying something, considering the criticisms of them that still exist today). There was a time when someone tried to get an article about every blog, every blogger, every podcast, every MMPORPG into Wikipedia. And that was on top of the articles about garage bands and neologisms sourced to Urban Dictionary that we still get. (Podcasts in particular were a pain. I only need say three words for anyone who remembers: We Hate Tech). The guideline page WP:NFT, originally titled "Wikipedia is not for things made up in school one day" emerged from this era, although it has since been rewritten and toned down from what Uncle G originally wrote (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_for_thi... is closer to the original tenor. This AfD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/The_Walking_Gam...) also is indicative of what we were dealing with at the time).
So many of us got militant and vigilantly policed the boundaries of the encyclopedia. I was a little bit BITEy, too, at times (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Th.... Note that the account trying to keep the article, despite its female username, later turned out to be a sock of the film's male director).
But I moved on eventually, as by 2007 times had changed, I found a lot more content areas to edit besides those I had originally worked on, we found other ways to separate Wikipedia from the larger Internet culture, we became stricter about sourcing articles, and so forth.
For some people, however, those times have never ended.
Daniel Case