Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Newsletter/January 2013
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Featured Editorial: Skyfall
 What happened? Is this really the Skyfall of Wikipedia? We have been building this big project for so many years now that talking about 2004 seems like a century ago. We have been working hard on this country and some of us already feel like citizens. We have seen this site grow up and show the best of us: our skills at writing content, our diligence in achieving new goals, our willingness to work with others. Sadly, some of us have been here long enough to let the worst appear too. The chaos has been disturbing this precious website since more than one year by now, and no one seems to care about it. Civility has been a big issue, and not writing about it is like ignoring that the sun comes up every day, but we cannot only focus on civility and ignore the rest either. Content work is what makes this site shine as it does when we all collaborate together. The content is the most important part of this site, and I worship what it represents inside a community which has fallen awry; a community which seems to be shaking the very foundations of what this encyclopedia means; a community that is putting the vested interests of soap opera above the interests of humanity. If we were one of those enterprises out there, we'd already filed bankrupcy. Every day that goes, is another day we abandon the notion of making content, and spend more time talking, shouting and playing the wild card of challenging each other to see who's the most nasty of all. Since 2009, the number of good articles passed has decreased substantially; the number of FA reviewers is approaching zero, the number of productive users who stay is going backwards. Seems like we cannot teach the newbies what we haven't understood ourselves. We are having so much fun playing the game of the cop and the thief, that we don't pay attention to those who really are interested in producing content, and when they bother us enough, we block them. Is that what we want? Is that what really means being a Wikipedian? We all registered an user account to have our contributions under a name, to be easily recognizable, and to be known when we work with other users who registered an account too. We are here because we were interested in producing content, but it seems like we have already forgotten. Jimbo Wales recently said that "the amount of quality work done by one editor in no way makes up for the astounding amount of quality work that they prevent by driving away good users and wasting the time of everyone." I have seen several users that have never got into trouble, who only worked on content (getting GAs and FAs on the way), being scared off by our bad behaviour, our increasing unpleasant way to communicate, our misleading sense of highness that avoids ourselves to touch the floor and see that, without a driver, we are headed to dystopia. If we don't realize this, if we don't stop and think, there will be no future. We'll soon be in a place like Rapture, where each one of us will be unrecognizable, and the main reason why the place exists will be lost in time.
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 Results from the November-December 2012 Backlog Elimination Drive:
As mentioned in the "Project News" section, a second RfC will be help in the coming months. If you have any propsoals to what can be improved further in future Backlog Elimination Drives, click on the "Add a comment" button below and your proposal could be included in the RfC! |
 
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