What happened in May 2007?

About the userbox wars: it wasn't a "senior" Admin, it was simply one who had received the bit from fighting vandals & had convinced the right people she/he had a clue. (You can figure out whom I'm talking about if you read the relevant threads in WikiEN-l.) But if it hadn't been for that Admin, I'm sure one of the other Admins on the WikiEN-l list would have done the same thing.

Nevertheless, the deeper problem in the userbox wars was that it fed the growth of a deeper rift in the community: to use the same words I used above, the "clued" versus "those without a clue." But instead of doing the statesmanlike thing -- reaching out & handing out clues (so to speak) -- they were treated like clueless end users who call technical support for help but can't tell the difference between a backslash & a forward slash. As a result, a lot of respect was lost between the different cliques or groups, & some important traditions -- such as not taking Wikipedia so seriously, remembering to laugh at ourselves.

(And I'm not exempting myself from making this problem worse. Although spoke out against this attack on userboxes, I should have done more: I should have tried to work to bridge between the groups. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time or the confidence to do that. And even if I had, I still might not have made a difference.)

As a result, I believe that Wikipedia has been drifting in a direction none of us really want to go, yet don't know how to change things. But then again, browsing threads in the WikiEN-l list from late 2005 & early 2006, I found numerous emails about how things were worse at Wikipedia than they were only a few years before. How does that saying go, the one about how things change the more they remain the same?

(P.S. -- It is somewhat disorienting to read these old discussions on WikiEN-l I participated in, but have almost forgotten. Sometimes I sound wiser than I think I am now, & sometimes I wrote the most stupid things.)