On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, John Lee wrote:
Geoff Burling wrote:
On Tue, 7 Feb 2006, Guettarda wrote:
On 2/7/06, Jay Converse supermo0@gmail.com wrote:
If people had WWJD (What Would Jimbo Do) in mind when they start fighting over stuff, a lot of this crap would just go away.
Actually I think the aura of the God-King has either faded for a lot of people, or they never had a sense of it in the first place (cf, Karmafist wheel warring with Jimbo). Our constitutional monarchy model has problems .
[I'm guessing John was referring to this comment; for some reason he snipped out all of my post:]
Jimbo is NOT a Godking. Nor a God. Nor a King.
One problem, Geoff: Jimbo *is* our GodKing. At least, that's what most of us refer to him as. I agree with everything else, you said, though. :p
ISTR that Jimbo in some email, years ago, disavowed this role in the scheme of Wikipedia. Looking thru past emails, the best I could do was to find the following post from Ed Poor (6 Feb 2004):
Jimbo is amazingly different from a GodKing (as described on Meatball Wiki). He subscribes to the principle that "government is best which governs least", but when push comes to shove he has occasionally put his foot down -- I know, awful metaphor ;-)
which puts me in the odd spot of agreeing with Ed, although I suspect he might not agree with the rest of what I wrote.
Although I doubt a "GodKing" would write something like the following as Jimbo had 21 jan 2003, because neither Kings nor Gods like to admit that they are sometimes conflicted over their decisions:
And finally, there is a class of decisions that weighs heavily on me, namely decisions about banning. My pleasant demeanor may not reveal how much I agonize over these, in *both* directions. Some mornings I wake up in a mood to ban everyone. Other mornings I wake up in a mood that says that everyone can be saved. So I have to think and worry a lot about these. Despite the difficulty, though, I like doing it well enough for now. But someday I might be exhausted by it, and might prefer a more broad-based procedure.
In any case, I still think of him as the guy who can pull the plug on this whole endeavor if he believes it isn't worth further effort, so it's a good enough reason to follow his lead. Until it isn't -- but then everything I've contributed is mirrored somewhere under GFDL or CC-BY, so I've lost nothing if the experiment implodes.
Geoff