[WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

Tue May 31 14:09:17 UTC 2005

May I ask what communities these are? Particularly the one with  
hundreds of thousands of members.

-Snowspinner

On May 31, 2005, at 1:44 AM, Skyring wrote:

> On 5/31/05, Phil Sandifer <sandifer at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>
>> That's it. That's all that's going to work. If we do not learn to
>> come down on Cranstons with fury and speed, over time, this community
>> will implode. One need only look at nearly every other Internet
>> community to figure that one out.
>>
>
> Why not look at the Internet communities that DO work? I'm a member of
> two such communities that have been running for years, and include the
> sort of members who are well-educated, well-spoken, intelligent and
> fun to be with.
>
> Both of them have very few rules and are largely run by the members.
> And above all, they are polite. Both of them are large communities
> that have dealt with growth in a plain common sense fashion, by
> recognising that new users don't have the same knowledge as "the old
> guard" and finding ways to deal with this.
>
> Somewhere along the way, Wikipedia seems to have lost something
> valuable. I look at this list and just about everything I see is one
> group of editors bickering with another group.
>
> For what it's worth, I'm an admin on one of these communities, a
> community with hundreds of thousands of members, and though I have
> power to add, delete, or modify just about anything on the site, my
> duties don't involve settling disputes or acting as an umpire, because
> there is very little of that to be done - my job mainly involves
> sorting out forgotten passwords or tracking down and correcting
> incorrectly entered information. It's a large but polite community,
> and I cannot help but contrasting it with the often poisonous
> atmosphere here on Wikipedia.
>
> I'm also a moderator on a list very much like this, but again, I don't
> have to deal with members throwing bricks at each other - I mainly
> work at keeping out the spam merchants.
>
> On the face of it, Wikipedia should be a place where co-operation and
> sharing drive an atmosphere of comradeship, where admins exist to help
> members rather than act as corporate police, and where the atmosphere
> is that of Utopia rather than 1984.
>
> -- 
> Peter in Canberra
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>