On 6/23/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
We are no longer a struggling tiny project which needs to go out of our way to get every possible beneficial scrap of work from anyone. We seek to have diverse participation from a wide range of people with different viewpoints, but we should also remember, always, how many good users we use when we are too "co-dependent" with our trolls.
Sorry to make a habit of it, but I disagree with you. At Wikipedia, I see a small number of people working on a massive number of pages, and the more help we get with that task, the better. We have a constant stream of people who come past, add a few pages, then leave - but there is little manpower to maintain those pages. I frequently edit pages which have not been touched in a year or more.
Sure, our US popular culture sections are totally under control, and do not need manpower. However, pick a different area, like French cuisine, or even any aspect of French culture, and to me it feels very much like a "struggling tiny project". I see the same small handful of names again and again. If there was a useful editor in this area who was going to be banned for image uploading, I would definitely mount an argument for retaining him without image privileges.
Maybe others see things differently, but I do not feel a massive influx in people contributing raw, valuable text to our encyclopaedia, which is something we're quite short of. We have lots of people joining us to help delete, categorise, clean, or write about their own pet topic - but do we really have so many helping to expand on our existing topics?
Steve