THIS USER IS: BURNOUT VICTIM It's been a great decade, but it's time to go. Or at least, time to hibernate. I've done all I can here.
The Inevitable EnWP Burnout...
- Acute Causes
- The May 2010 image deletions really shook my confidence in some leaders.
- The lack of engagement and discussion in June 2011 elections shook my faith in the global movement.
- The admission from a 'trusted insider' that my communications are ineffective and largely ignored shook my faith in my ability to productively improve the large-scale movement.
- A dispute about deletion of fair use material shook my faith in our project's ability to embrace 'openness' to the extent needed.
- Chronic Causes
- Any deletion of good-faith contributions is demoralizing and a little 'un-wiki'.
- Instruction creep and an increase in 'because we said so' logic
- In content disputes, the best revision doesn't win-- the most passionate faction's revision wins. Quality doesn't always improve over time.
- Substantial edits involve Too much 'BS' time (edit disputes, etc) not enough 'authoring' time.
- Insight and Predictions
- Radical innovation is required to solve these problems.
- WMF doesn't innovate rapidly or well.
- Non-WMF services will outpace our own projects.
- The cutting edge be distributed-wikis or cloud-wikis.
- WMF will be forced to play technological 'catch up' for the foreseeable futurs.
- Positions
I continue to strongly support the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wiki Movement, and EnWP and wish the organizations the best. I will continue to support their values in the future. Wikimedia is a good thing, worthy of our support. But the stress has outstripped the payoff-- money and code I'll donate-- donating large chucks of time just isn't worth the hassles.