On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 10:48:43 -0700, "George Herbert" <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: YMYA. Only in my case I'm looking at industrial controls and quarry plant. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 22/10/06, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter(a)gmail.com> wrote: with these types of distributions of edits. I think the issue is being overblown a bit. Some people prefer to be involved in the day-to-day running and administration of projects and I don't think there's a problem with letting them do this. Encyclopedia Britannica hires many people who are involved in admin-only work. If there were hundreds of users doing this there would be a problem; we'd have to examine why so many non-participating users are influencing policy. -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

On 23/10/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com> wrote: That may be the case if they do have a large number of single edit mainspace contributions, but they actually got straight into administration issues from the time they arrived, starting with XfD's in their first few edits and not stopping up until now. Maybe my initial summary was wrong. I was simply trying to point out that unless you know what the deal is with editing articles, how can you deal with the meta issues? Keep in mind this is not what I would call a company, its a single class community IMO. Peter Ansell

Andrew Gray wrote: You're both right. Applying this to any one editor would be a time consuming process. Administration is an open pit of a job where it's very easy to lose track of why you are involved in Wikipedia in the first place. Civil engineers with great ideas about design and construction end up administring companies, and never do real engineering work again. Worthwhile as it may be we have never asked admins to subject themselves to reality checks from time to time. It would be a great idea to require that admins spent 10% of their work on real edits, but I doubt that it would be enforceable. Ec

geni wrote: Sorry if those words weren't clear. By "real edits" I mean edits to directly improve articles in the main namespace. By "work" in this context I mean a person's overall efforts in any namespace. Ec

On 10/22/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Why even worry about the distinction? The notion that we should be micromanaging other people's editing habits, or really entertain the notion that one sort of editing is more "real" than the other, seems totally counterproductive to me. Last time I checked this was a volunteer enterprise with no shortage of database space, so who cares? More damage seems to be caused by the periodic attempts by people to enforce their own "Wikipedia norms" onto others than by any of the "deviant" behaviors by themselves. We must accept that something as decentralized and sprawling as a massive wiki will not be a tightly-run ship. It can't be, and it doesn't need to be. It's a bazaar, not a cathedral, to use Raymond's terms. If two dozen editors want to use Wikipedia to play Sudoko all day, it is easier to let them do it than it is to bother with trying to create complicated metrics, guidelines, and rules, and then enforce them and deal with adaptation, resistance, and frustration. FF