G'day geni,
On 6/16/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
Once we were worried about the newbie contingent getting so large that new users were in fact starting to consider themselves old hands and influencing Wikipedia (see: CVU admins, userbox fiasco). It's gone beyond that, now: these days, the newbies are offering *advice* to more clueful users, and expecting it to be taken.
So in other words the next generation is comeing through. Experence suggests that complianing that "It wasn't like that in my day" doesn't work too well.
When I felt comfortable enough to start saying "this is how Wikipedia works" rather than "um, I think this is how things go, isn't it? Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm kinda new, but that seems to make sense, so ... yeah, what do you think?", there weren't any old hands who got upset with me for not merely lecturing them on how things work, but getting it Wrong. I've been criticised, quite fairly, for any number of things ... but *not once* for a tendency to, for example, tell a user who has done good work in vandalism cleanup and warning vandals and testers that his behaviour when RC patrolling is unconscionable, because he's not robotic enough.
I don't have a problem with "the next generation coming through" --- I *was* the next generation less than a year ago --- but the members of that generation telling people the Wrong Thing and acting like it's gospel (it's bad enough when *I* get lectured like this; what happens if it's a newbie getting bad advice?), well before they've matured enough to be considered to have "come through" that get my goat.