On 06/06/07, Gabe Johnson gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/6/07, Gabe Johnson gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/6/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/06/07, Joe Szilagyi szilagyi@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/5/07, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia, though, has remained under the effective control of a pretty small part of the community. And the core community has grown more effective as it has learned what it does and doesn't want the encyclopedia to be... <snip>
Unfortunately, this makes two pretty presumtuous statements. One, it presumes that the 'old core' of admins, those that can trace their WP time back to 2004-05 and earlier, will remain in power.
Ah, no. It presumes that the old core successfully enculturate a new core - not that the very same people remain in a position of power, but that a group of people who think the same way as them do.
Wikipedia, as a community, *really* dropped the ball on enculturating newcomers in or around early 06; I wish I knew why or when or how, but I don't. It's reasonable to say that before a certain point, new users were met and slowly enculturated into the general "way we do things around here"; after a certain point, this stopped working as well.
And so we end up with... well, groups of people who just appear to inhabit a different project, who came here thinking this was an experiment in online democracy or a neat social-networking site or a place to strike a blow against The Man, *and were never convinced otherwise*. By the time any group of different initial assumptions has grown large and old enough it looks like the old guard to new users, then the project's governance and culture is heading in interesting directions.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
[[Eternal September]]? ~~~~
-- Absolute Power C^7rr8p£5 ab£$^u7£%y
Coincidentally, I started around April 2006. Just saying.
(Back when [[Wikipedia:Esperanza]] still existed....) ~~~~
I'd say that if you're posting to wikien-l, you're enculturated!
It's not so much that after a certain point, new people Just Didn't Get It (whatever It may be), but that after a certain point the proportion who Never Got It began steadily to grow.
...
...so what is "It" that we're moaning about people not getting? That's the open question. What are the systematic gulfs of difference in opinion beyond large segments of the current population and the general community as it was before, say, early 2005? The most obvious thought is "eventualism versus immediacy".