The September That Never Ended

From the JargonFile:

All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period beforehand, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups.

Wiki is getting hit by an increasing amount of people that just don't grok the community. How can we StaveOffSeptember??

I've been noticing it too. The problems range from ignoring the egoless voice usually preferred here, to blatant disregard of the local style conventions, to out-and-out misuse (WikiIsNotYourBlog). As usual, the correct solution is education; as usual, this may not be the practical solution. However, I think that the right course for the time being is to keep acting as a WikiGnome, but with an ear for when pages need to be refactored ruthlessly, and when they need to be nudged gently in the right direction.

I endorse the suggestion of persisting with quiet wikignoming, attempting to improve the linkage of the information and keep it up to date in selected areas. Often this is done cooperatively in a completely unplanned way. In the last few days, I responded to lists of orphan pages by linking some of them into the appropriate category (mainly CategoryMath as is happens). Then over the next few days several of those pages have been picked up in RecentChanges by someone else and edited to improve content. At the same time, I have noticed that the new page count has been increasing faster than content free pages are being deleted. It is spring (at least in the northern hemisphere), and gardeners turning over the soil bring up buried treasure. I value this site as a repository of good knowledge on lots of things, particularly to do with programming patterns and techniques. On some sites I am working on elsewhere, I use links to the information here rather than duplicate it elsewhere. -- JohnFletcher

See WikiSpringCleaning

Hey, just a question for ThoseWhoWereThere: is this the case with online chat? I mean, yes I've heard of IRC, of course.... and though the SignalToNoise is much better there than any more public facing chat room, it's still kind of a lame place, depending on the chat room. WikiIsNotChat??

As I recall that fateful day, there was not much online chat, as the main chat tool was talk, which required you to know the hostname of where your opposite was logged in. -- PeteHardie (incipient OldFart)

CategoryWikiHistory