Dear Friends:
As a quasi-outsider (and sometime commentator on WP in the press), I was
glad to see the issue of civility and procedure raised here. It's important.
en:wp was a very welcoming place to newbies in the beginning. It's less so
now.
The question of civility is of particular relevance for me, now, as I'm
trying to convince academics to participate in Wikipedia. More specifically,
I'm attempting to set up a Project in which professional Russian historians
(100s of them) regularly add and clean up entries, and have their students
(1000s of them) do the same. Some of these historians, however, have
already had bad experiences on en:wp. What am I to tell them? I could say
that incivility is a cost of doing business in open projects like Wikipedia.
But I fear they will respond by saying they want nothing to do with such a
business. That's not a good thing.
What to do about incivility and all the pettifogging rules, I'm not sure.
But I'm heartened to see the issue discussed.
Warmest Regards, Marshall Poe
On 10/25/06 8:03 AM, "Rich Holton" <richholton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Walter van Kalken wrote:
On some projects I still have moderating bits, I
hereby ask the stewards
to take these bits away as I do not wish to spend to much time anymore
on the projects, I might shout a bit from the sideline. The wikimedia
projects will always exist, and the original idea was great.
Unfortunately Winston Churchill was right .... democracy works in theory
only. When the masses take over like on our project, the sum gets
lowered to the level of the masses. Which means herd thinking.
Walter,
When you say "moderating bits", do you mean your administrator status?
If so, I urge you to withdraw your request. There are, I believe, many
of us "old-time" admins, who stay away from the politics, use our admin
powers sparingly, and perhaps contribute sparingly. While we may be in
the minority, there may come a time when our presence will be important
to the project again.
In the meantime, keep your admin privileges. They have not (yet) decided
that the privileges can be removed due to lack of use.
-Rich Holton
(Rholton on en.wikipedia)
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