On 10/7/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 10/7/07 12:22 PM, Christiano Moreschi at moreschiwikiman@hotmail.co.uk wrote:
I don't know, Marc. Wikipedia is not a closed "community": it is such an open one, with people entering and leaving all the time, that it is questionable whether the editing "community" is really worthy of the name.
Obviously, some editors are worth trying to retain, but losing people is scarcely a problem for us. We can simply draft in a new population or two.
That is a sad state, Christiano. Perhaps that is why the reliability and consistency of the Project is so much in question in the larger world.
Why is it a sad state? That statement strikes me like saying that the United States or Canada is a weak and untrustworthy country because it keeps attracting immigrants; it's patently absurd. The attractiveness of the project to new volunteers should never be used as an attack on it; quite the opposite, I think our continued success relies on maintaining our ability to attract good new editors from outside the "community".