From: geni geniice@gmail.com

By the same token you don't tell 800 people. Anything that is too secret to be in the public domain should not be told to 800 admins. -- geni

Geni is right - very little will be achieved by "going private" in emails or IRC for Wikipedia admins.

The only thing that will happen is what happened at dmoz: the admins retreated behind a firewall and clubbed together for safety. Intermediate users, the ones doing the real work, could no longer get "promoted" to being an admin ("meta" as dmoz had it).

So the intermediate users trickled away. Unable to even see what being an admin meant, they couldn't even apply. Anyone who did was rounded upon. So they slowly left and found other interweb hobbies.

That left the admins in their ivory tower and a succession of new users who were either vandals or needed cleaning up after.

So the admins spent their entire time booting people and/or cleaning up. New stuff didn't get added. The directory ossified.

Five years ago, dmoz had the headlines for being a wonder of the internet. Now Wikipedia has them. Do we really need to follow their path so completely that we must repeat their mistakes?

We are a '''wiki''' after all. If people have an issue with the 20% downside that the 80% upside allows, there are other places to go. But they don't tend to remain dynamic for long.

:"REDVERS"

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