QUOTE(MZMcBride @ Mon 23rd November 2009, 1:06pm)
Some of the comments were interesting, I suppose. Most of them seem to accurately define
butthurt, though.
Typical attitude... (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/bored.gif)
In any group of individuals who are active on the interwebs, you're going to have increasing numbers of anti-Wikipedia voices appearing over time - that's because Wikipedia is, by nature, the sort of endeavor that's highly inclusionary to begin with, and then reaches a "critical mass" point at which it gradually becomes more and more exclusionary. That happened to WP in 2006... This will all become more obvious during the Lockdown Phase™, which will probably begin in about 2-3 years, or sooner if WP starts running banner ads.
In fact, one might even call the Lockdown Phase the "Exclusionary Phase," and the Growth Phase (already in the past) the "Inclusionary Phase," but that's only from the WP user's perspective, not from the more general perspective of readers/websurfers.
But the way to postpone (or even theoretically prevent) the Lockdown Phase is to actually
listen to those who feel they've been excluded and figure out if there's a way to address their concerns. Wikipedians don't really do that anymore - they were sort of doing it half-heartedly for a while, about a year or so ago, but mostly they're no longer interested now. (Perhaps this is because they're far more worried about how attrition will affect the future maintenance effort, or perhaps they've had too many bad experiences, from their perspective, with trying to be fair to those they consider "spammers.")
Obviously, I personally think the sooner the Lockdown Phase occurs, the better, but in order to encourage it I should probably start calling it the "Stabilization Phase" or the "Integrity Phase" or something like that.
"Wikipedia Forever" - fundraising campaign, or non-stop laff riot?
