"Community" is a loaded term, because it is typically self-praisingly used by a relatively small number of administratively-oriented Wikipedians to describe themselves. It's basically WP:AN/ANI, Arbcom & associated access level seekers, and those who use Wikipedia as a social or socializing network. The vast majority of *content* editors, occasional or prolific, are completely unaware of this other side of Wikipedia. It's they who build the encyclopedia. I'd argue that where Wikipedia articles are good, it's a result of the content editors, not the administrative participants lauding themselves for riding herd on them.
Lila Tretikov has said that the proper definition of the Wikipedia "community" is *all* the editors, administrative participants, and readers. The administrative subset is not a *representative* subset of that. It's rather a self-selecting and much smaller subset with its own behaviors. You can see this recently I think, where in the current Arbcom elections, it has installed a filter to screen editors with less than 500 edits from asking questions of the candidates. I'm not aware that it has yet barred such editors from actually voting, but that would be the next step following its own logic. What the administrative component is doing is protecting its own influence and position by keeping these others out of the process.
Todd Allen took it a step farther below by proclaiming "community members" as "way more important than readers." Seems pretty brazen and non-inclusive to me, and illustrative of the attitudes of the administrative set.
Trillium Corsage
02.12.2015, 16:36, "Todd Allen" <email clipped>:
That's nice. Do you want me to explicitly say "Volunteers are more important than readers"? Alright. Volunteers (community members, or dismissively, "power users") are way more important than readers. We're the reason there are readers at all. On Dec 2, 2015 9:20 AM, "Andreas Kolbe" jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 3:41 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
> Also, the banner pops up, comes down, and covers most of the page. That's > really not acceptable. Wikimedia should follow acceptable ad practices, > which means a small and STATIC banner, not something that moves, shouts, or > otherwise interferes with page content. That should be done even if it > makes it less effective and raises less money, just to address the > inevitable butbutbut.
Well, to be fair, the Foundation seems to have done its homework on these issues with last month's survey.[1]
When it comes to matters like banner intrusiveness, what matters most is what the average reader thinks. Volunteers are not necessarily a representative sample.
[1]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Wikimedia_Reader_Survey_... _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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