On Wednesday 05 February 2003 04:00 am, brion wrote:

On lun, 2003-02-03 at 11:47, Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

Here's my WikiKarma: I spent the whole damn day trying to put out WikiFires and spread WikiLove, and managed to make virtually no headway with any of it. =20 I'm *this damn close* to going on a banning spree. But, I'll relax first.

There, there. We've all been having a tough WikiWeek (and it's only Tuesday!) We'll pull through though...

Jimbo, I'd just like to thank you for continuing to support and host this project, despite the enormous amount of crap you have to put up with.

Mega dittos, err... yeah, me likes Jimbo too. :-)

No seriously. Without Jimbo's foresight, crazy ideas and unusual selflessness this project would not exist at all. IMO the Internet without Wikipedia is either a very boring and static place to do research or it is a cacophony of yelling, flames and other buzz (sic there is no real focus to any of it). But Wikipedia, I think combines a worthwhile goal to create a research resource with just enough of the buzz aspect of the Internet to allow us to collaborate to further our goal.

Yes, sometimes the buzz does get a little loud, but the goal is still being worked on. Jimbo is also in the unenviable position of mostly seeing the bad elements of Wikipedia. However I am either editing Wikipedia or at least monitoring Recent Changes for 12 hours a day now and what I see is greater than 99% valid edits that improve articles (3+ edits a minute now just in en.wik!).

IMO vandalism and dross as a percentage of edits has in fact gone down, way down, since I joined over a year ago (at least in en.wiki). This is the opposite of what I expected. But with so many edits every day even a very low level of vandalism, dross and unfriendlyness tends to be a lot in an absolute sense. And these problems are distilled from all the good things that happen in Wikipedia and brought to the mailing list.

Our once little town is now a bustling city that never sleeps complete with thriving and distinct "ethnic quarters". Before, a volunteer fire department and a combined town Mayor/Sheriff was perfectly fine to run the town. IMO now what we need is a "city council" headed by a mayor who appoints a "Sheriff" (who in turn appoints "deputies").

But to form such a structure IMO we need to become a non-profit first (thus "council members"/"Sheriffs" and "deputies" would have legal roles and would be that much more accountable for their actions - or inactions).

Thank you Jimbo for making Wikipedia possible. :-) Please understand that we are just going through some major growing pains right now.

Wikipedia: Order from Chaos.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma: I added a lot of events to [[February 1]] and updated all the year pages and many of the other articles linked from there.