John Lee wrote:
As for clandestine activities, that was another, well, I think you can only call it strawmanning. I never mentioned their names - I think highly of Jimbo and Angela (I don't know Anthere well enough). It's just rather odd and a bit annoying that the majority of editors who could and would benefit from this still aren't informed, because they don't subscribe to the mailing list.
When I first became involved it was mandatory that a person join the mailing list before he could become a sysop. It's unfortunate that that is no longer the case.
Each of us is limited in the number of lists and pages that he can monitor. Once we reach that limit we just stop looking for more things to monitor. The mailing lists alone now provide me with close to 100 messages per day. There are also several in-project pages that I look at regularly that are more specific to the tasks that I have accepted. I can't take the time to monitor everything that happens on meta or the foundation pages or on Wikipedia's Village Pump, or to fully participate in the endless debates and votes about policy minutiae. This does not reflect a lack of interest, but a lack of time.
Perhaps a more serious look needs to be taken at how general communications are handled to insure that those who should know about something are properly informed. At the very least all sysops for all projects should be required to join a general mailing list. (Just which list may still be an open question.)
Ec