[WikiEN-l] So you think you can be a Wikipedia article

[Stan Shebs]

Oldak Quill wrote:

>On 24/07/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>
>>That's a nice fantasy, but nobody works for no reward at all. For
>>instance, we reward random editors by letting their contributions
>>appear on a top-20 website; editors who continually have all their
>>edits reverted eventually get the hint and go away. If every policy
>>I propose gets shot down or subverted, how long do you think I'm
>>going to keep doing it?
>>
>>Stan
>>
>
>I'm not saying there should be no reward. As you say, the reward is
>helping the project, getting a featured article, getting a policy
>through, or devising a new way to collaborate.
>
>My point was that we don't want leaders who are leaders only because
>they enjoy the perks. Our current system ensures that our transient,
>changing leadership are those who want to do something for the
>project, or believe the project should have some feature or device.
>Institutionalised leadership tends lose sight of the project and be
>lazy.
>
Your repeated references to "perks" are revealing; leadership is
not about the leader getting some kind of unfair advantage over
others, it's about getting groups of people to work together, rather
than at cross-purposes. Transient leadership is ineffective - think
of the Italian government - instead of working out compromises,
people who disagree simply wait for the leader to be gone and the
group to disperse, then undo everything that they accomplished. We
see this every day, in the endless circular arguments on notability,
verifiability, userboxes, fair use, capitalization of species names,
AfD, and on and on and on, which are in turn reflected in a continuous
churn of edits that never actually add any new content. We could be
a lot more effective at the ultimate goal if we actually encouraged
people to make tough decisions, then backed them up rather than
tore them down.

Stan