On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:48 AM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We have been, to some extent, the victims of our own
success. We grew
exponentially and not organically, and given the roots of our community,
the usual group structural forms were eschewed. There was also practically
no money for anything for a very long time (our fundraisers now raise as
much in a day as they did in the entire year when I first joined up), and
very few employees who kept the operation together with shoestrings and
sealing wax, while everything else was left to the editorial communities
(and the volunteer developer communities) to keep things going. This
"flattened hierarchy" of leadership worked reasonably well with a smaller
editorial community that had barely scratched the surface of content
creation, but quickly showed itself to be impractical when editors joined
in droves - many of them focusing on hand-to-hand combat with vandals.
Those who loathed wasting their time cleaning up after vandals were glad to
have this newer cadre join them; however, there was a palpable difference
in their reason for becoming part of the community, and when the number of
highly active contributors more than doubled over a short period of time,
it was impossible to provide an effective process to help them learn the
technical, policy, and cultural expectations. Efforts to try to remedy some
of these issues have been largely unsuccessful, with an overwhelming
proliferation of often-conflicting policies that are nearly
incomprehensible to the uninitiated, an overabundance of badly written and
poorly descriptive templates, and a dependence on automated tools for
social interaction.
The lack of flagged revisions is a key contributor to this state of
affairs. The English Wikipedia is ridiculously vulnerable to vandalism. Is
it surprising that that vulnerability attracts large numbers of vandals and
vandal fighters?
Andreas