Stewards Resignation

I kind of stayed off this wiki for a while but enough is enough.

I strongly suggest, that if the so called stewards have the least of sense they ought to resign their "stewardship" position immediately.

There are two reasons for that:

1) Failure to be accountable to the community. I personally called them to task on that and indicated one very easy way in which they can show their willingness to answer to question, complaints from the people who are impacted by their action (funnily enough, although they banned IP neighborhoods left and right, it seems like it was never the case that they ever banned their own neighborhood). But nobody did anything.
- Not true: We keep banning my neighborhood, from time to time. (It gets to be quite annoying, really.) So at least some of us are feeling your pain.
2) Using the power they've been granted in a way that was proven to be harmful to C2 wiki. Creation of interesting content on programming has grinded to a halt. Now that TomStambaugh is mind wiping due to a incident related to their "stewardship", they managed to achieve the net negative return on investment.

So now they ought to take responsibility for this result.

To their defense some stewards have invoked various "excuses" (as if excuses matter)

that given the primitive tools that Ward assigned to them they unfortunately can do nothing better. First of all, they could have done at least one thing better that I had suggested to them. But the excuse is irrelevant by default. If they can do nothing better, and what they do currently sucks then they ought to refrain from doing what they doing. That means resigning, such that Ward can take account that his stewardship experiment failed, and take a different decision. Like he can put C2 in formol, make it read-only, etc, program better defense mechanism, etc.
That they avoided the edit wars of the past and kept wiki relatively quiet. This is no accomplishment. Wiki could have been read-only for this whole period, and it wouldn't have been any significant difference, it would actually have been much better. Because this whole period although I monitored wiki, I failed to see any interesting content being produced. So the actual net growth before October 11th 2006 was a big flat 0 that could have been acomplished much easier by making wiki read-only. Now with the departure of TomStambaugh we have negative growth, both in terms of content and in terms of community atmosphere.

I am kind of fed up with all kinds of unconvincing explanations and excuses and circumstances and stuff like that. I would like to see some action. So who's the first steward to take responsibility for the results? -- CostinCozianu

Ward's stewards fund this wiki. This came from Ward's mouth as he was trying to setup stewards. Would you rather have the wiki shut down? If it does, it affects the credibility of the WikiWay; some of these still being practiced in other communities.

"stewards fund this wiki"... don't be ridiculous. Look at dreamhost.com for example (which I use). For less than $100/yr you get 200 GB (yes, giga) of storage and 1 TB (yes, tera) of monthly bandwidth. The monetary costs of running this wiki are negligible. -- AndyPierce

Costin, I'm curious: Why do you take the Stewards to task for TomStambaugh leaving, but didn't take Anon to task when Colin left?

-- DaveVoorhis

Maybe because Tom named others including yourself. And you are a friend of Earle and he kept quiet about your excesses. If Earle is not a steward and claim the moral higher ground, then less is expected of his behavior.

Eh? That doesn't answer the question. It doesn't even make sense. You're not Costin, are you? -- DV

In a neat piece of opportunism, after keeping schtum for months, Costin suddently pops up on the moral high ground. On the other hand, most of what he has to say is fud: "creation of interesting content on programming has grinded to a halt... the actual net growth before October 11th 2006 was a big flat 0..." Untrue. (In fact, Costin's comments are weirdly reminiscent of the kind of thing Abitbol used to say, right down to the use of bold text.) I've seen plenty of new content - for the volume of contributors this site has at the moment, which is very low.

I think Tom is making a serious overreaction. As I understand it, the way things used to work around here is that if you didn't like a page, you'd ignore it. I also think that nobody should have started hurling abuse at anybody else on that page.

By the way, the reason I requested that the page be kept is that Nomad works on the MemoryHole principle. I've actually lost count of the number of pages indicting him for his behavior that existed for a while before he quietly deleted them with DoubleEdits and removed any proof of how much he is disliked by the community here. This leads newcomers to ask, every few months, "what's wrong with what this guy has been doing?" I am grateful to DaveVoorhis for his short chronology of events on MessageForTheStewards.

I don't know why Ward has not programmed any additional defenses for the site. I'll tell you what I've been doing. I've spent hours on the telephone, at my own expense, trying to get Nomad kicked off his ISP. After weeks of going up the administrative chain, emailing them amassed log files, getting them in contact with Ward personally, and receiving numerous promises of action taken, I've reached a bureaucratic brick wall. All of a sudden, after their telling me that Nomad was performing a "denial of service attack" on this site (their words), they've changed their opinion and have somehow managed to conveniently lose all evidence of the information I've been sending them since the beginning of the year! I don't understand how, or why, but there you go. If you want to email Mary Brown, who works for the Internet Security Team at NTL Cable, on mary.brown@ntl.com, and tell her what you think of her customer, be my guest.

There's really not much more I can do, with the sole exception of taking this to the police, and I know that's going to be a hard job. Not least because I have to explain all of this over again, and probably take time off my job to do so. I'm trying to build up the strength to do it, but it's difficult. I'm very, very tired. But I swear to you that I am going to fight Nomad like a rabid dog until this is over and this community can be itself again.

So maybe you can see why when Costin pops up like this and starts mouthing off, I write it off as a load of bullshit.

-- EarleMartin

For your own good, I hope you do not pursue this action. Nomad is not this wiki's greatest problem, and you get rid of him another loonie will come right along. This wiki is dead content-wise since the stewards mechanism started (your optical illusion notwithstanding) and blaming it on Nomad is completely silly. As long as this wiki is connected to internet there will be plenty of nomads, abitbols and so on, so forth. You might as well blame it on the internet. --Costin

I think the most urgent issue is to make sure that GoogleLovesWiki again. Stewardship has always been a thankless, tedious job on pages flooded with irritants. But the stewards found reward in the fact that there was fun, interesting stuff going on in recentchanges. Now, there is only editwars, Anon, and old stuff. But would we even notice the noise of Anon among the signal of many pages being modified in interesting ways?

The Wiki is slowly collapsing from stagnation without Google providing fresh knowledge into it. Wiki is a leaky bucket that makes up for leakiness with the constant inflow of new knowledge. The inflow is dried up without Google. As long as GoogleHatesWiki, so will the stewards. -- MartinZarate

While it may be true that the wiki is not what it was, it's still rewarding and there are still some interesting talks on it. For instance, I've started recently a page named PropertiesInCsharpQuestion and the exchange of thought was interesting (at least for me). I know that GoogleHatesWiki now, and that might be because WikiHatesGoogle?. But, at least for me, the site is still interesting both in content and comunity. -- AurelianoCalvo

List of people giving up the stewardship

FolksStaying and Why?

ChrisGarrod I keep coming back and finding interesting stuff since about Spring of 2000 editing very rarely, but really loving the fact that I usually can edit anything now.
JohnFletcher I enjoy contributing to the sections related to work I am doing, and developing discussions about how best to do things. I have been around here so long I now know the answers to some of my own past queries, and encounter things I put here and had forgotten about. I miss some of the people who were active last year and do not seem to be around now. I am assuming the folks here means all of us and not only stewards.

OctoberZeroSix