[WikiEN-l] Worrying trends

[Poor, Edmund W]

Steve ranted:

> Wikipedia's Achilles heel was inevitably going to be
> its size, and the unwieldiness of managing or guiding
> large group trends. If you think about any society in
> general, its continuity is dependent on the
> establishement of ritual behaviours. Wikipedia's core 
> principles are for the most part exactly what should be, but 
> Ive been concerned that we lack rituals for indoctrinating 
> people into a sense of our community goals and nature. 

[snip]

> The general idea, back in the day, was that as
> problems grow, the community must restructure to
> answer them. Disputes gotten too big for JW and the
> mailing lists?--empower a committee to deal with this,
> and another to deal with that. The point is that these 
> committees are more than just bantha fodder--they represent 
> community structure, which is just as important as software 
> structure, or NPO structure. If were not responsive in terms 
> of community structure... <i>aw, look at me, I'm ramblin' 
> again.  Wal, uh hope you folks enjoyed yourselves. Catch ya 
> further on down the trail.</i>

Not rambling, Steve, that was a darn good rant!

Our community of volunteer writers still have not developed sufficient
dedication to avoiding bias and incivility. This might be due (in part)
to a lingering sense of anarchistic idealism. Anyway, there is a
well-founded fear that "structure" and "government" will lead to
tyranny. 

I've been experimenting with [[Wikipedia:Policy enforcement log]]. I've
made a lot of templates and (proposed) policy pages. Tim Starling wrote
a cool little hack to allow blocked users to edit their own talk page. 

Steve and I have revived the Mediation Committee (Mgm asked me to
co-chair). I'm trying to wrap up two VERY DIFFICULT article mediations
before my vacation tomorrow.

A lot of problems Wikipedia has comes down to:

* "I want the web site to reflect my own ideas, feelings and desires."

This comes into endless conflict with our stated mission of creating an
unbiased yet comprehensive free encyclopedia. Nonetheless, we've done an
outstanding job. We've got the world's attention, but we need to figure
out how to take it to the next level.

Uncle Ed

P.S. I will be on vacation July 22-31. (Try not to tear down the place
while I'm gone. ;-)