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

[Gabe Johnson]

On 6/6/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

[[Eternal September]]? ~~~~


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