Brian wrote: <snip>
And relationships are being formed right now in the group of new-ish users that have been brought together over user boxes that will indeed result in attempts to shout policies through. Not to be melodramatic but I really think we're at a crossroads here.
The increase in usage has brought a lot of new users in, some of whom have been active in forum-like sites where participation and acceptable ways of communicating are much different.....
I had been active on internet forums for several years before joining Wikipedia, so I had some idea of netiquette and such before I starting trying to influence things. I suspect many users have been active in online communities far longer than I have, back to the Usenet days. But what we are getting now are internet n00bs (and they are well deserving of that term) turning up and acting like it.
But because we are the nice people that we are, we assume good faith and don't bite the newbies, and these people, the truly clueless who have just discovered the internet and think that Wikipedia is just another online community, we *aren't* deploying the clue-by-fours, we are letting these people integrate and suddenly there are so many that you can't tell who is and isn't a n00b until they do something stupid (like passing RfA and unblocking the vilest trolls).
Now, I am confident that there *are* people who have a clue out there, and that they *are* getting this grand encyclopedia of ours written, but maybe we need to go back to basics: remember what Wikipedia is Not (in all namespaces, not just main) and get on with why we are all supposed to be here.