on 4/20/07 11:20 PM, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) at newyorkbrad@gmail.com wrote:
What I view as the other top priority issue facing the project is the extraordinarily high rate of turnover and burnout that we seem to suffer from, especially among top-level administrators and leading contributors. Turnover is part of any Internet project as any other part of life, but when I read the names of the participants in an RfA from say a year ago, or I look at the list of bureaucrats or former arbitrators or top featured article contributors or whoever, I am consistently amazed and saddened by how high a percentage of the names on the list have moved on. Sometimes after a spectacular departure, sometimes after vanishing without a trace. As highly as I think of our collective contributor and administrator base at present (and I do think that we have an incredibly strong talent base on this project, no matter how critical I or anyone might be of some or another aspect from time to time), just imagine how much greater we could be if a percentage of those people were still with us. I believe we need to identify the causes of Wikipedians' stress and burnout -- or in NPOV terms, of departures from the project -- and figure out if there is a way to reduce them.
Brad,
CULTURE! CULTURE! CULTURE! CULTĀ! What you are talking about presents to the very culture of Wikipedia itself. The quality of a culture can be measured, in part, by what that culture produces. Yet every time I have tried to bring this up the subject has been met with silence, or dismissed as a "fuzzy liberal's POV". The fact is - if a serious look at this aspect of the project is not undertaken in earnest, it is facing a future of increasing mediocrity, deteriorating credibility - and ultimate failure.
Marc Riddell (also referred to by some as Cassandra)