[Wikinews-l] [Fwd: Re: [Foundation-l] the features...]

Fri Jul 8 04:52:08 UTC 2005

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikinews-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org 
> [mailto:wikinews-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Erik Moeller

> 
> If anyone 
> does, please do post, publicly or privately. I have hardly 
> edited at all 
> in recent months. The heated conflicts of the last few days involved 
> several people. I was *not* involved. I have never been in an 
> edit war 
> on Wikinews - except for one with Amgine over an NPOV tag. 

No problem here in general - although I would advise you to make your role
very clear to some of the more persistently argumentative folk who have a
habit of turning to you and looking for a final authority to settle personal
opinion disputes. Maybe a big disclaimer on your userpage that if they are
looking for a King Solomon-type, you are not that person and that that
person or role does not really exist for Wikinews, per se, outside of
mandates on project behavior and minimum standards on our content which come
from the Foundation.

And just to make things crystal clear, when I mentioned the so-called
"cabal" on meta - I did not mean to include Erik/Eloquence.

Being that WN is such a small project with many folks who are only
occasional contributors, I believe it is at a stage where some of the more
prolific "instruction creepers" (those who seem to prefer telling others how
they should write or contribute to the project rather than write new content
or pitch in to fix/re-write flawed content themselves) - seem to turn
cannibalistic on fellow wikinewsies on a semi-regular basis. Somehow they
have self-anointed themselves with a bizarre "village elder" concept that
some form of Wikinews authority to control others derives from the fact they
make multiple edits daily on already over-edited policy pages. This is the
"cabal" I mentioned and its membership is rather fluid although there are
two or three members who appear and re-appear regularly.

--
David Speakman
http://www.DavidSpeakman.com
501 Moorpark Way #83
Mountain View CA 94041
Phone: 408-382-1459