[WikiEN-l] CZ fork: Tendrl

[Tony Sidaway]

Oops! "arbitrators have led" should of course read "administrators have led."

Sadly this hasn't been a cost-free change, though I think it was
unavoidable. Adminship was originally seen as a mop-and-bucket
function, but that idea has collapsed in the face of the actual
requirement to have neutral adjudication and enforcement that scales.

So admins who are willing to enforce are the most powerful and most
controversial editors, and the community is torn on who gets to wield
that power. There is also persistent though not unanimous demand for
community desysop.

But the pressure on working sysops, it seems to me, has not increased
because of that. The Committee has done much to improve admin
protocols and empower active admins, and that has tended to defuse
once-dangerous situations. An admin in 2010 knows much more about what
is expected of him. A score or so of arbitration cases have settled
that.

On 12/12/2010, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> The challenge facing us in 2006 was improving what was in those days
> sometimes rather dire but promising content at the same time as we
> held the basic shape of the thing together.  We had seen a population
> explosion in which our registered userbase had suddenly doubled.
>
> It was during that turbulent era that our science content matured as
> never before. People who had stood at the sidelines stepped forward
> and the quality of the resulting content began to attract serious
> attention. We've also taken effective steps to improve a significant
> point of weakness: coverage of living people.
>
> I didn't foresee any of that. What I did foresee was the way the
> community would evolve. As Charles says, the Committee has begun to
> act more like Jimmy Wales. The arbitrators have led in dealing with
> behavioral problems and we have developed community processes that
> would have been impossible  to contemplate publicly just five years
> ago.
>
> The upshot: we've retained and improved our community in the face of
> serious challenges.
>