On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:48 AM, Risker <risker...@gmail.com> wrote: > We have been, to some extent, the victims of our own success. We grew > exponentially and not organically, and given the roots of our community, > the usual group structural forms were eschewed. There was also practically > no money for anything for a very long time (our fundraisers now raise as > much in a day as they did in the entire year when I first joined up), and > very few employees who kept the operation together with shoestrings and > sealing wax, while everything else was left to the editorial communities > (and the volunteer developer communities) to keep things going. This > "flattened hierarchy" of leadership worked reasonably well with a smaller > editorial community that had barely scratched the surface of content > creation, but quickly showed itself to be impractical when editors joined > in droves - many of them focusing on hand-to-hand combat with vandals. > Those who loathed wasting their time cleaning up after vandals were glad to > have this newer cadre join them; however, there was a palpable difference > in their reason for becoming part of the community, and when the number of > highly active contributors more than doubled over a short period of time, > it was impossible to provide an effective process to help them learn the > technical, policy, and cultural expectations. Efforts to try to remedy some > of these issues have been largely unsuccessful, with an overwhelming > proliferation of often-conflicting policies that are nearly > incomprehensible to the uninitiated, an overabundance of badly written and > poorly descriptive templates, and a dependence on automated tools for > social interaction. >
The lack of flagged revisions is a key contributor to this state of affairs. The English Wikipedia is ridiculously vulnerable to vandalism. Is it surprising that that vulnerability attracts large numbers of vandals and vandal fighters? Andreas _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
