[WikiEN-l] Why are veterans so militant of late; The Future. (was Bus Uncle)

[Tony Sidaway]

My take on these things.

In January, 2006 I predicted that as the community grew administrators
would exercise more discretion and start to handle disputes in a
fairly autonomous manner, with arbitration taking a backup role.  This
is because arbitration doesn't scale and admins do.

I think that's happened pretty much as I predicted.

Another thing that has happened is the growth in the number of people
who are basically second class Wikipedians, because they aren't yet
acculturated, and they probably never will be.  Some of these people
are even administrators.  So we've got a lot more stupid clutter on
talk pages, a heap of stupid user categories, and those pesky old
userboxes. Meh, we've worked around it, and we'll deal with it if it
becomes a serious problem.

Wikipedia, though, has remained under the effective control of a
pretty small part of the community.  And the core community has grown
more effective as it has learned what it does and doesn't want the
encyclopedia to be, which problems need to be dealt with quickly and
which can just be ignored.  Robots now perform  in a matter of hours,
feats that would have taken weeks in the past.  Problem users who
would have made it to arbitration before now end up being blocked
indefinitely, because we recognise the behavior patterns and we know
that the prognosis for rehabilitation is very low indeed.

Through trial and error, we've reached the threshold of  a radically
different vision of the encyclopedia regarding the treatment of living
people.  Most of the pieces are in place, and the level of acceptance
is high.  The core community will get behind it and make it work.

So the way I see it, we've met and passed the test of our Long
September.  We have learned to manage change and diversity, and the
quality of our articles has grown as we have learned to manage them by
subject area.  We're slowly but surely overhauling some of our more
decrepit and non-functional institutions and processes, totally
bypassing them where necessary, changing the ground rules where that
can be done in a sustainable fashion.  I'm very optimistic about the
future.