User:Obuibo Mbstpo/Cops vs. hippies

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A lot of Wikipedians seem to be living in different worlds within the same wiki, as a result of the different interests we take. This is not a new observation. We know that there are wikignomes, new page patrollers, RC patrollers, etc. But our choices of what we do affect our whole outlook. Or maybe our outlook affects what we do.

In my case, I am creating new articles all the time, so I tend to run into CSD and so on much more often than editors who concentrate on existing articles. But I hardly ever run into vandalism, or blatant spam pages, because I don't hang out at Special:NewPages or Special:RecentChanges. Someone who hangs out there would probably take a much different perspective on things than myself. They are on one end of the CSD, and I'm on the other.

It's kinda like how police officers tend to, over time, become more conservative (or so I'm told by the book Be a Cop). They see all kinds of stuff that we will never see, and they are exposed to it every day. Some police officers I've known probably went too far in that direction, being overly suspicious and quick to jump to conclusions about someone's bad intentions. They want to punish the bad guys, to deter them from committing more crimes, and if an honest person here and there gets caught in the crossfire, so be it. Can't there be a happy medium? Sometimes it seems like this is the 60s, and it's a clash between the Yippies and the National Guard.

Anyway, it occurred to me, we can't all be cops, and we can't all be civilians either; we have to have a balance of everyone to be a full wiki-society that can function the way it needs to.