[WikiEN-l] What is happening to the community

[Ron Ritzman]

On 3/5/08, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Erik is right. What is happening to the community is the real issue.
>  Even when I joined Wikipedia as a relative latecomer in 2004, the
>  sense of community and shared purpose was still palpable. People fell
>  out, of course, and made mistakes, but AGF wasn't an empty gesture or
>  a rule we blindly followed. We assumed good faith because we were all
>  here to give of our time, without payment or any benefit other than a
>  feeling of satisfaction, to produce something that might help to
>  educate and enlighten other people. In exchange, we hoped that others
>  would educate and enlighten us. It was the most inspiring idea I'd
>  ever come across, that people all over the world could unite to
>  benefit each other in that way.
>
>  But suddenly Wikipedia became very popular,

Maybe this is the gist of the problem. AGF and all that good stuff are
values developed on small wikis and it probably still works that way
on other wikis like meatball. It may still work here too on the
project and article level. The drawback with this is when other
wikipedians who you don't know from Adam drop out of the sky and
nominate your article for deletion, challenge the fair use rationales
of your images, remove your spoiler tags, or otherwise challenge
something in your article based on some policy discussion made
"somewhere else" by people who you don't know.