On 20/10/06, Peter Ansell
<ansell.peter(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I have been increasingly worried about one editors
contribution
history lately. The vast majority (possibly over 90%) of their last
500 edits have been in Wikipedia/Wikipedia talk space. It is my
understanding that Wikipedia: space is for editors to use to organise
the development of articles.
My question is how does an editor--who spends all their time in
Wikipedia space--know what they are trying to achieve?
The real question is what was before those 500 edits. Are we talking
someone who only sits in that namespace ever, or are we talking a
several-year-standing highly active user who happens to have been
focusing on project work in the last few weeks?
The answers for the two cases are very different.
You're both right. Applying this to any one editor would be a time
consuming process. Administration is an open pit of a job where it's
very easy to lose track of why you are involved in Wikipedia in the
first place. Civil engineers with great ideas about design and
construction end up administring companies, and never do real
engineering work again.
Worthwhile as it may be we have never asked admins to subject themselves
to reality checks from time to time. It would be a great idea to
require that admins spent 10% of their work on real edits, but I doubt
that it would be enforceable.
Ec