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

[Andrew Gray]

On 06/06/07, Joe Szilagyi <szilagyi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/5/07, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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... <snip>
>
> Unfortunately, this makes two pretty presumtuous statements. One, it
> presumes that the 'old core' of admins, those that can trace their WP time
> back to 2004-05 and earlier, will remain in power.

Ah, no. It presumes that the old core successfully enculturate a new
core - not that the very same people remain in a position of power,
but that a group of people who think the same way as them do.

Wikipedia, as a community, *really* dropped the ball on enculturating
newcomers in or around early 06; I wish I knew why or when or how, but
I don't. It's reasonable to say that before a certain point, new users
were met and slowly enculturated into the general "way we do things
around here"; after a certain point, this stopped working as well.

And so we end up with... well, groups of people who just appear to
inhabit a different project, who came here thinking this was an
experiment in online democracy or a neat social-networking site or a
place to strike a blow against The Man, *and were never convinced
otherwise*. By the time any group of different initial assumptions has
grown large and old enough it looks like the old guard to new users,
then the project's governance and culture is heading in interesting
directions.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk