[WikiEN-l] Comparison with other wikis

[Geoff Burling]

On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, John Lee wrote:

> Geoff Burling wrote:
>
> >On Tue, 7 Feb 2006, Guettarda wrote:
> >
> >>On 2/7/06, Jay Converse <supermo0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>>If people had WWJD (What Would Jimbo Do) in mind when they start fighting
> >>>over stuff, a lot of this crap would just go away.
> >>>
> >>Actually I think the aura of the God-King has either faded for a lot of
> >>people, or they never had a sense of it in the first place (cf, Karmafist
> >>wheel warring with Jimbo).  Our constitutional monarchy model has problems
> >>.
[I'm guessing John was referring to this comment; for some reason he snipped
out all of my post:]

> Jimbo is NOT a Godking. Nor a God. Nor a King.
> >
> One problem, Geoff: Jimbo *is* our GodKing. At least, that's what most
> of us refer to him as. I agree with everything else, you said, though. :p
>
ISTR that Jimbo in some email, years ago, disavowed this role in the
scheme of Wikipedia. Looking thru past emails, the best I could do was to
find the following post from Ed Poor (6 Feb 2004):

> Jimbo is amazingly different from a GodKing (as described on Meatball
> Wiki). He subscribes to the principle that "government is best which
> governs least", but when push comes to shove he has occasionally put his
> foot down -- I know, awful metaphor ;-)

which puts me in the odd spot of agreeing with Ed, although I suspect
he might not agree with the rest of what I wrote.

Although I doubt a "GodKing" would write something like the following
as Jimbo had 21 jan 2003, because neither Kings nor Gods like to admit
that they are sometimes conflicted over their decisions:

> And finally, there is a class of decisions that weighs heavily on
> me, namely decisions about banning.  My pleasant demeanor may not
> reveal how much I agonize over these, in *both* directions.  Some
> mornings I wake up in a mood to ban everyone.  Other mornings I wake
> up in a mood that says that everyone can be saved.  So I have to think
> and worry a lot about these.  Despite the difficulty, though, I like
> doing it well enough for now.  But someday I might be exhausted by it,
> and might prefer a more broad-based procedure.

In any case, I still think of him as the guy who can pull the plug on
this whole endeavor if he believes it isn't worth further effort, so
it's a good enough reason to follow his lead. Until it isn't -- but
then everything I've contributed is mirrored somewhere under GFDL or CC-BY,
so I've lost nothing if the experiment implodes.

Geoff