[WikiEN-l] You Really Don't Get It

[Marc Riddell]

on 4/20/07 11:20 PM, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) at newyorkbrad at gmail.com wrote:

> What I view as the other top priority issue facing the project is the
> extraordinarily high rate of turnover and burnout that we seem to suffer
> from, especially among top-level administrators and leading contributors.
> Turnover is part of any Internet project as any other part of life, but when
> I read the names of the participants in an RfA from say a year ago, or
> I look at the list of bureaucrats or former arbitrators or top featured
> article contributors or whoever, I am consistently amazed and saddened by
> how high a percentage of the names on the list have moved on.  Sometimes
> after a spectacular departure, sometimes after vanishing without a trace.
> As highly as I think of our collective contributor and administrator base
> at present (and I do think that we have an incredibly strong talent base on
> this project, no matter how critical I or anyone might be of some or another
> aspect from time to time), just imagine how much greater we could be if a
> percentage of those people were still with us.  I believe we need to
> identify the causes of Wikipedians' stress and burnout -- or in NPOV terms,
> of departures from the project -- and figure out if there is a way to reduce
> them.

Brad,

CULTURE! CULTURE! CULTURE! CULTŠ! What you are talking about presents to the
very culture of Wikipedia itself. The quality of a culture can be measured,
in part, by what that culture produces. Yet every time I have tried to bring
this up the subject has been met with silence, or dismissed as a "fuzzy
liberal's POV". The fact is - if a serious look at this aspect of the
project is not undertaken in earnest, it is facing a future of increasing
mediocrity, deteriorating credibility - and ultimate failure.

Marc Riddell (also referred to by some as Cassandra)

-- 
"The world is too terrible a place to live in, not because of the bad things
that happen, but because of the good people who stand by and do nothing."

                                                             Albert Einstein