[WikiEN-l] Why has everything gone to hell?

[geni]

On 2/7/06, Alex Schenck <linuxbeak at gmail.com> wrote:
> Alright, look. I came back from a two-week break to witness the explosion of
> the wheel warring crap. From what Jimbo has said to me, he is very tired of
> the lack of cooperation that used to exist. What ever happened to that sense
> of respect for each other,

Never existed. People were just polite enough to hide their lack of
respect most of the time.

> when people actually understood that Jimbo's word was final,

On balance I'd say that one started to crack around the answers.com
thing. The WP:TOOLS link never did happen.


> that the ArbCom is in fact the judicary body that knew what they
>were talking about,

On blanance when the community outright rejected the Stevertigo
descission. Then there was the various issues around kelly martin and
jimbo messing with the election.

>and people would respect time on the project?

If you mean raw length of time on wikipedia then it probably just
became diluted currency. There are so many people who have been here 1
year plus that it is a pretty meaningless distinction.

>I mean,
> come on. When people start giving out USER WARNINGS to people such as David
> Gerard, you can tell that the times have definitely changed, and some
> oldy-moldy (or at least somewhat oldy-moldy editors such as myself) are not
> liking what we see.

It's been going on for a long time. I blocked Ambi back when she was
an arbcom member (3RR). Didn't seem to cause any problems.

>
> Mindspillage and I are on the same wavelength (I'll let her speak for
> herself beyond that): we miss the old community that was focused more on
> writing an encyclopedia instead of focusing on user pages and userboxes.
> What ever happened to writing FEATURED ARTICLES?

We seem to finaly have moved above a rate of one per day. The writeing
the encyopedia community is still there. You just need to write.

>Instead, we have people
> more focused on userboxes ("this user rebelled against the great userbox
> purge of 2006 [redirect to RFC:kelly martin] and would do it again"... wtf!)
> and arguing with others.

Because they feel that they are not being respected.

> At this point, I'm afraid desysopping people would be like placing a
> band-aid on an artery wound. Why has the community changed instead of
> adapted? We're not myspace, we're Wikipedia. Can we keep it that way?

Sure. If we can get people to follow policy again. After recent events
it is in many ways all we have left.
--
geni