Hi all, There's been lots of whingeing lately about evil admins taking over. Just wanted to say, I still love Wikipedia, and spend hours there every day. I do quite a lot of editing on an extremely diverse range of subjects, and participate in a broad range of Wikipedia community activities, of which WP:FPC and WP:DYK are probably my favourites. I come into contact with lots of different editors, and by and large, I think they're great, and the vast majority that I encounter are well and truly there to build an encyclopaedia.
In my 4000 or so edits, I've had the misfortune to witness one or two petty fights, but rarely get involved. I don't think I've been the victim of any serious personal attacks, and have only once witnessed blatant, sustained POV-pushing. I've never been on the wrong end of admin misdeeds, and with only two minor exceptions, I think they do a great job.
I adore browsing random topics, splitting and merging articles as needed, and generally trying to organise information to make it as useful as possible.
There probably are all sorts of tensions going on at the talk pages of major pages, but there are so many topics that still don't even have articles (Les Bidochon, one of France's more well-known comic strips is one), so it's easy to avoid those problems - if one wants to.
Just a dose of WikiLove for you all :)
Steve
Seconded on all points!
In my 4000 or so edits, I've had the misfortune to witness one or two petty fights, but rarely get involved.
Seriously, though, how misfortunate is that? The fights, and the occasional POV war, are utterly inevitable. What gratifies me is that, most of the time, we still *do* do a good job of finding the elusive NPOV middle ground. I don't have more than a few thousand edits myself, but I've had the *pleasure* of wandering into a couple of POV battles on contentions subjects, learning a bit more about those subjects, learning a bit more about the personalities involved, and contributing some compromise wordings which both sides accepted and which are among my proudest Wikipedia edits.
On 6/23/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Seriously, though, how misfortunate is that? The fights, and the occasional POV war, are utterly inevitable. What gratifies me is that, most of the time, we still *do* do a good job of finding the elusive NPOV middle ground. I don't have more than a few thousand edits myself, but I've had the *pleasure* of wandering into a couple of POV battles on contentions subjects, learning a bit more about those subjects, learning a bit more about the personalities involved, and contributing some compromise wordings which both sides accepted and which are among my proudest Wikipedia edits.
Well, true. For me, Wikipedia is still so big, and at such an early stage of development, that spending hours fighting over a couple of sentences isn't a good use of my time. Meanwhile, the hundreds of different types of pastas are barely stubs (look at [[Fettucini]]), and they're all grouped into one thematic category - Pasta. We've got work to do! :)
Steve