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

[Stan Shebs]

Alex Schenck wrote:

>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? 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.
>
To keep things in perspective, if it weren't for the mailing list,
I wouldn't even have heard about the wheel war. 99+% of editors
and I daresay, at least 90% of admins are just working away and not
getting into fights of any sort; I personally am content just
exercising admin powers to revert random vandalism and whack unwanted
images, and using the bit of spare time left over to add some of my
own content.

While the conflicts do matter and need to be resolved, let's not get
overly focussed on those. It would be interesting to see the results
of a "friendliest admin" contest for instance - who has managed to
do the most admin actions with the least amount of complaint, and
what's their secret? Are we holding up fighters as exemplars, or
diplomats? War is exciting, but peacetime is more productive.

Stan