Caretaker

Revision as of 14:23, 14 January 2004 by 142.177.8.70 (talk) (for every list of bad guys, there's a list of good guys)
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A caretaker works quietly and patiently to make a large public wiki better. They do not engage in "enforcement", "policy debate", or personality issues unless literally forced to, e.g. by usurper behaviour and lack of courage facing it down. An enraged caretaker is usually a relatively formidable opponent, and often recruits many thoughtful others who object to the usurpation. By fighting it, they seek to prevent a bad copy problem or self-interested fork problem that would result if "the original" were to be usurped completely by a faction or social club whose goals are not those of the majority of contributors - projects so usurped become enemy projects if their values and technology and culture can't be kept away from essential projects whose integrity that the caretaker wants to protect.

For instance, the following are caretakers of the Wikipedia project and often defy the GodKing and other usurpers such as w:User:Angela to keep it "on track" as an encyclopedia:

Note: many of these users have been driven off by the ruling Wikipedia clique.

There are also observers such as w:User:ChrisRoy who seek to gain some power by "studying" the interaction between caretakers and the usurpers.