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(a)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