[WikiEN-l] Just what *is* Jimbo's role anyway?

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

Jimbo's role seems to be that of a strange attractor. His actual  
amounts of a) power, and b) influence are significant but limited.  
Like the planet Jupiter, he doesn't have enough gravitational pull to  
assemble things into an arbitrary pattern through brute force.

But he seems to have an intuitive understanding for the interplay of  
forces governing Wikipedia's chaotic behavior. He can detect the  
places where things are in a delicate unstable balance, so that  
pushing on it will actually have a lasting effect (rather than a tiny  
shift and a return to equilibrium once the force is removed). And he  
even can guess what the general effect is likely to be.