User:Giano/The_future, Giano shows leadership Options

[Mr. Mystery]

User:Giano/The_future.

Good luck with that.

[Peter Damian]

More proof that Wikipedia is now a form of entertainment.

I am one of the top content contributors here and I am able to get along just fine. The system isn't broken. [[User:Ottava Rima|Ottava Rima]] ([[User talk:Ottava Rima|talk]]) 16:40, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

[MZMcBride]

More proof that Wikipedia is now a form of entertainment.

Personally, I find Wikipedia Review far more entertaining. I get the same level of interactivity as Wikipedia, but I'm not expected to be productive here. It's nice. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

[Kelly Martin]

I'm not expected to be productive here.

I have seen no evidence that you have ever been productive at Wikipedia either, or that (in fact) anyone there is expected to produce anything in particular.

Actually, a majority of Wikipedia editors stick pretty much to editing articles whenever they happen to be in the mood. They have at most incidental or occasional involvement with the whole administrative apparatus of the site, or the various opportunities it provides for "moaning and groaning."

You left out a very salient point, and one which I think you would prefer to ignore: when they do run into the administrative apparatus of the site, the experience tends to convince them to find other pastimes. And yet, the administrativichiks, a caste of which you are a senior member, seem to think that this is not indicative of a problem.

[Cla68]

I'm not expected to be productive here.

I have seen no evidence that you have ever been productive at Wikipedia either, or that (in fact) anyone there is expected to produce anything in particular.

Actually, a majority of Wikipedia editors stick pretty much to editing articles whenever they happen to be in the mood. They have at most incidental or occasional involvement with the whole administrative apparatus of the site, or the various opportunities it provides for "moaning and groaning."

You left out a very salient point, and one which I think you would prefer to ignore: when they do run into the administrative apparatus of the site, the experience tends to convince them to find other pastimes. And yet, the administrativichiks, a caste of which you are a senior member, seem to think that this is not indicative of a problem.

I've had the ANI forum on my watchlist for about two years now. I agree that Wikipedia's admins are probably doing a better job now than they were three years ago when I first started editing. If you look at ANI, however, some posts still go unanswered and some still don't get resolved even after rounds of inane discussion by various admins.

What Wikipedia needs is more structure for admins, a "how to" guide that gives standard responses and block lengths for the same types of problems that occur over and over. The admins need some type of elected admin guidance committee, to which they can go to with questions or concerns instead of the unofficial, teen-age admin mutual admiration society which exists in the IRC forums. Perhaps a forum which can be seen by everyone, but which only admins can edit. An admin appeal board, such as Tony1 has been working on, needs to be formally established. When admins make good or bad decisions, such board needs to annotate this on a scorecard for each admin which everyone can see.

Every editor with 4,000 main space edits should be automatically granted adminship, but it also needs to be much easier to desysopp incompetent or inactive admins. If an admin performs no administrative actions within a six-month period, they should be automatically desysopped in order to influence admins to at least help out a little with admin work.

I am also not necessarily convinced that is a problem as the primary objective is still writing an encyclopedia.

I remain to be convinced of that. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia (at least not one that any sensible person would be proud of), nor is it (as far as I can tell) getting any closer to being one. Its policies have been trending away from, not toward, positions that I would think likely to be conducive to the production of encyclopedic content, especially with the extremely strong (but very inconsistently enforced) proscription against editorial synthesis, which is, for all intents and purposes, the gravamen of the encyclopedia form.

I have done synthesis in several of the featured articles that I have written. Synthesis is sometimes necessary in order to completely explore the topic of an article. If you do it right, the only people who will object are POV-pushers. Aren't we taught in school in the west to synthesize what we read in our sources when we report on something? In those instances, we're graded on the quality of our synthesis, i.e. if we're able to back it up with an argument that makes sense after looking at our supporting sources. For example, this section which I wrote, is synthesis. Check the sources. So far, no one has objected to it, even though the article was featured on the main page and was looked-at by more than 100,000 readers. So I'm thinking that I did it right.

This post has been edited by Cla68: