Here are some old Somey posts about the "Maintenance Phase".
QUOTE(Somey @ Sat 8th September 2007, 5:49pm)
Personally, I'm sticking to my "Five-Phase Lifecycle Theory," which suggests that there won't be a quick collapse at all, but rather a gradual process of attrition resulting in stagnation and ultimately, breakup.
Right now we're firmly in the "Maintenance Phase," which I believe started about a year ago. Just for the record, the phases are:
- Formation
- Growth
- Maintenance
- Attrition
- Breakup
I expect the maintenance phase to last at least five years, and to be characterized by increased authoritarianism and regimentation - mostly in the name of curbing the tendency towards infighting, which in turn is being caused by too many people wanting control of various "important" topic areas. This will result in an almost social-Darwinian "shakeout," which will end with firm control of all worthwhile territories by whichever of the various groups, cabals, cliques (or whatever you want to call them) should "win" them. That will bring on the attrition, which will be expressed as mass "forking" of entire topic areas to other websites.
Jimbo's increasing interest in "open source" web-crawling technology may suggest that he himself has realized this as a distinct, even likely possibility - there's no company better positioned to take advantage of the WP breakup than Wikia, and combining "encyclopedic" content with human-filtered search results may be his primary scheme at this point. I'm not sure I'd even call it a bad scheme, to be honest, though obviously I'd rather someone else was in charge.
(Bolding mine)
QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 30th December 2007, 8:26pm)
QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Sun 30th December 2007, 11:50am)
So they waste it all spending hours of their lives every day reverting people and trying to get things deleted?
Why not, if they've already written everything they feel they can, and gotten the articles they're interested in well into shape, to last with minimal editorial maintenance over time? I'd imagine it's a lot more fun than participating in "policy discussions."
You mustn't oversimplify this issue, Lamont - these are not people just showing up out of nowhere and wanting to delete things just for the sake of deleting them, or because they're offended by "cruft" proliferation. For the most part, they're established users who have seen the problems of maintaining a 2-million page database first-hand. Every one of those 2 million articles is a potential problem that would, and often does, have to be solved by human intervention - in many cases, LOTS of human intervention.
Obviously in an ideal world, you could build a database of a zillion articles, and all of them would be consistently improved over time until they couldn't be improved any further, at which point nobody would touch them. But realistically
that just doesn't happen, mostly because the perception of content-quality is always relative, and perfection is always unachievable. (And, of course, there are people who just like to "vandalize.")
WP has been firmly into its maintenance phase for well over a year now - in fact, I would say two years. As the ability of new users to stake out territory by writing new articles is diminished, WP will be left with a relatively small, and (due to burnout, etc.)
shrinking, hard core of committed maintainers, fighting an ever-growing army of spammers and POV pushers. Over time, the database will have to be increasingly locked down to deal with it - there's almost no way to avoid that. Deletionism actually
postpones the lockdown phase by making maintenance less of a drain on human resources.
This is also why it's so important that people like JzG, Durova, and other corrosive "black hat" personalities are "shown the door" - in the long term, the "white hat" Wikipedians can't allow
anything that causes their core group of maintainers to shrink. On the contrary, they should actually
reach out to people in business, government, and academia to help ensure that standards are maintained as long as possible, even if it means making a few concessions, such as opt-out for biographies, noindexing of specific pages or categories, and so on.
Will they actually
do any of that, though?
Of course not - these are not long-term thinkers we're dealing with here.
QUOTE(Somey @ Thu 16th October 2008, 4:34am)
QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 15th October 2008, 9:54am)
On top of everything else, the use of pseudonyms quickly issues in the circumstance that the pseuds in question have nothing else to talk about but pseudonyms.
I actually see this as a sort of "sub-phase" in the Wikipedia life cycle, one that impacts this website as well as other sites that are related to WP in some way, or that include significant portions of the WP community. Another term for it might be "Phase transition factor."
Essentially, I've always posited that the Maintenance Phase (which we're in now) would eventually give way to the "Lockdown Phase," and that this would occur over the course of roughly 5 years (we're now getting towards the end of Year 2). But the mechanism by which this will occur is interesting in itself. My assumption is that three main issues will drive the transition: Editor-gang politics, the leadership vacuum, and the destabilizing effects of anonymity.
It may be that the anonymity problem is the thing they try to deal with first, except that it's a veritable certainty that they won't "solve" it in the sense of making it either go away, or figuring out some magical means of ensuring that the system isn't abused by sock puppeteers, meat puppeteers, or members of the Boston Meat Sox. The only way to even
allow for it is some degree of lockdown applied to the actual content - i.e., what I'm assuming will happen.
If they were like,
super-smart, they'd deal with the leadership vacuum first, because that's at least theoretically solvable (even if, from a practical perspective, it isn't any more solvable than the rest of their problems). If they had effective leadership, they'd at least have something to help them deal with the other issues - otherwise, they might as well just go ahead and make the whole database read-only now, if only to save time.