172 has announced on his user page he has left. I know that this is not
the first time and I also know that not everyone on this list will
necessarily find this unfortunate, but I think it is a pity as his
contributions have been enormous. The issue appears to be, not so much
the brief de-sysoping yesterday, but rather the editorial process. Here
is the text on his user page:
[quote]
I am an historian specializing in international political economy, which
allowed me to work on a diverse range of time and place on this site. I
was a Wikipedia contributor from late 2002 to February 2005, and an
administrator from May 2003 to February 2005.
Over the past couple of years, I was using a pseudonymous account, and
the name I was using in my Wikipedia email account was not my own. Given
Wikipedia's sketchy reputation in some circles, I wanted to avoid any
possible negative consequences in the "real world"; and I did not want
the less-than-friendly environment on Wikipedia to come back to haunt me
off-line. Unfortunately, when the community knows you as 'just a
number,' you don't tend to be treated so well.
I will no longer contribute to Wikipedia. The project is no longer
workable. There are no signs of Wikipedia developing an authoritative
public review process. The absence of one fosters a total disregard for
expertise in this community; whether nor not you are taken seriously
depends not on the merit of your work but rather how many friends you
have made with the users who dominate the mailing list, IRC, and the
administrative pages.
Instead, we have a dispute resolution process fetishizing increasingly
rigid (and idiosyncratic) community norms and customs without reference
to who's writing encyclopedic material and who's not. As a result, far
too much power and status is given to people who are frankly nothing
more than trolls, as long as they're good at gaming the system. The
admins are increasingly obsessive of process, disregarding the public
credibility of the project. Far too many seem to get off on "patrolling"
conflicts between other users that they do not understand, an aspect of
Wikipedia that is poisoning the atmosphere.
Thus, in recent months I was spending more time dealing with users with
no intention of writing encyclopedia content, who were spending many
hours a day feeding off conflict between other users or were dumping
sheer nonsense in as many articles as possible. I no longer have the
patience to deal with this. I will return, however, if there are any
changes allowing me to become a more efficacious user in the future.
172 14:44, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)
[/quote]
From: [[User:172]]