[WikiEN-l] Requirements for Adminship

[Ray Saintonge]

Stan Shebs wrote:

>Marc Riddell wrote:
>  
>
>>on 2/19/07 4:50 PM, Jossi Fresco at jossifresco at mac.com wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>I speak of a culture that has
>>>produced the most amazing results in the history of on-line
>>>collaboration.
>>>      
>>>
>>Is the same culture that began WP the same one in place today?
>>    
>>
>I just crossed my four-year anniversary, and while I can't speak to the 
>beginning, the culture hasn't really changed much in my time here. 
>
I thought you were here longer than that.  I think the culture has 
changed.  The Seigenthaler incident was a big turning point in that.  
After that the rule bound control freaks seem to have become more 
dominant.  We had to respond to Seigenthaler, but in the process we 
ended up with a lot of unnecesarily restrictive procedures.

>The 
>biggest change for me is the larger scale; once upon a time I "knew" 
>most of the admins and active editors, in the sense that I had read 
>their work and had some sense of who they were. Now I can see a mention 
>of somebody, wonder "who is that?", and see a history of 20K+ edits in 
>areas I didn't even know existed. So I think the culture could change 
>simply by different groups, unaware of each other, devolving into 
>disparate subcultures.
>
Yes, I can even remember trying to predict when we would reach 100K 
articles.  Some of the creative energy can still be there in some 
WikiProjects.

>The webcomics thing is a case in point. From my "old-school" POV :-) , I 
>tend to regard webcomics as intrinsically non-notable, and yet there is 
>another part of the WP community that is intensely focussed on writing 
>about webcomics, defining inclusion criteria, etc. On the flip side, 
>though, when I look at how they actually go about their work, it seems 
>very much like things we did on the early days of the ships project, 
>back in 2003. So I think that as long as we have some ongoing 
>cross-pollination between different specializations, that we can keep 
>things from splintering too much.
>
I can take or leave webcomics, but it's still interesting to see how 
some of them regard Wikipedia.

Ec