Tony probably considers me one of the people referred to in: "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."
I joined WP last September for two reasons; one was quite simply to work on better individual articles. The other was to improve the scope and reliability of WP in general. Having taught about WP as a teacher of librarianship, I was very aware of the problems.
The problems derive from the practices of the people who began, and it is right that an turnover in the more experienced people should change things. They were interested for the most part in demonstrating a concept, and also in providing a platform for writing about what they were interested in in a way that would have somewhat more stability and responsibility than usenet. They accepted each others' ways, they asked for very little in the way of authentication, they documented careless from the relatively limited array of online sources, they were primarily interested in a very limited range of topics--and those were not covered well by other available sources, they were willing to use any PD content whatsoever regardless of obsolescence, they controlled behavior and standards by a consensus of the most active members & they were in general agreement.
None of this is the case now. BJAODN is a typical product of the old school, as is poking fun at the unfortunate. Some of the problems now are over-reaction. A draconic BLP is a reaction to an irresponsible lack of policy. An overinsistence on the details of GFDL is a reaction to irresponsible attitudes to copyright. A requirement for formal sources were important subjects intrinsically have no formal sources is an overreaction to the use of inadequate sources even where there were good ones. Each of these will reach a balance.
The use of arbitrary structure and decision making however remains. A policy where any admin can delete anything and any other admin can reverse him made sense only when they knew each other. Now, it's a parody of direct democracy--it's rule by autonomous warlords in a world without boundaries. I know of no organization whatsoever of this size which even attempts to work this way. It persists because people are for the most part sensible--as are the new admins, in my somewhat biased opinion as one of them.
But some established administrators generally, not just in WP, react to threatened change by hardening their positions. I--and all or almost all of the newer people--would never dream of the sort of extensive one-sided or otherwise unfair actions that have taken place. I cannot imagine deleting on my own authority a group of long-established pages on a relative technicality. I cannot imagine a process of repeatedly nominating pages for deletion until it by chance happens. I cannot imagine a process of staffing the deciding body in such a small and unrepresentative a way that such variation can occur. I cannot imagine having a deliberative process like Deletion Review or AfD and then letting a single person decide to not let actions under them run their course.
I would never intervene administratively in a matter where I have debated. But the established people do this all the time, and think it justified.
DGG