Quality\community balance

@FT2

to make the point, I had to use polar opposites. Real life is somewhere in the middle.

Please do not confuse the words "goal" and "brand." As you stated, there can be several goals simultaneously; there can only be ONE brand.

I think your statements are oversimplifications of a very complex issue. If you understand how most entrepreneurial companies start up, and how they grow and change, you can use that lens to get a better grip on the whole concept of Wikipedia. Wikipedia may be growing past its infancy and toddlerhood and entering an uneasy adolescence during which things change that some people want to hold onto. I am not in this statement advocating any specific path. i am rather asking that we take a look at what it takes to get where Wikipedia is going and what we need to take into account for Wikipedia to stay genuine.

My daughter is a perfect example. I do not carve her out of the block of marble that her life is. I give her the tools that allow her to become what she is supposed to be. I do not create the "supposed to", she does. Because of a lot of circumstance, we have had to make constant course corrections. My life has become a dance around her course corrections. but because I love her and am committed to her I do it willingly, even when, as in this week, my entire life is sidetracked by her course corrections.

Wikipedia is still carving itself out of that block of marble. I dance around it because I see its value. i also know it will emerge as itself over time, and that many course corrections will be made in time. I know all of this, because I have helped raise over ten children in my lifetime, and I have run five entreprenurially based companies, three of them mine. I am currently shaping another stat up for a friend of mine and guiding him through the same process. it is never painless.

If people care to research the course of entrepreneurial startups or to try to better understand how things change as people and companies grow up, then maybe all these growing pains I beleive I am seeing as people struggle with what needs to go and what needs to remain at Wikipedia would cease being such a struggle.

just mho but one I think is worthy of consideration.