Dear Friends:
As a quasi-outsider (and sometime commentator on WP in the press), I was glad to see the issue of civility and procedure raised here. It's important. en:wp was a very welcoming place to newbies in the beginning. It's less so now.
The question of civility is of particular relevance for me, now, as I'm trying to convince academics to participate in Wikipedia. More specifically, I'm attempting to set up a Project in which professional Russian historians (100s of them) regularly add and clean up entries, and have their students (1000s of them) do the same. Some of these historians, however, have already had bad experiences on en:wp. What am I to tell them? I could say that incivility is a cost of doing business in open projects like Wikipedia. But I fear they will respond by saying they want nothing to do with such a business. That's not a good thing.
What to do about incivility and all the pettifogging rules, I'm not sure. But I'm heartened to see the issue discussed.
Warmest Regards, Marshall Poe
On 10/25/06 8:03 AM, "Rich Holton" richholton@gmail.com wrote:
Walter van Kalken wrote:
On some projects I still have moderating bits, I hereby ask the stewards to take these bits away as I do not wish to spend to much time anymore on the projects, I might shout a bit from the sideline. The wikimedia projects will always exist, and the original idea was great. Unfortunately Winston Churchill was right .... democracy works in theory only. When the masses take over like on our project, the sum gets lowered to the level of the masses. Which means herd thinking.
Walter,
When you say "moderating bits", do you mean your administrator status? If so, I urge you to withdraw your request. There are, I believe, many of us "old-time" admins, who stay away from the politics, use our admin powers sparingly, and perhaps contribute sparingly. While we may be in the minority, there may come a time when our presence will be important to the project again.
In the meantime, keep your admin privileges. They have not (yet) decided that the privileges can be removed due to lack of use.
-Rich Holton (Rholton on en.wikipedia) _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l