Thought I might interest myself in this having just been savaged by a pack of pups (in the end I had to write their headmaster).

Any known groomers? Out or PM.

By mature I mean one over 18, by juvenile I mean one under 18, by grooming I mean mentoring of course but then I'm a realist.

>one over 18
>one under 18
>grooming


I see what you are implying. Colbert_stare.jpg

shocked, shocked, shocked I say, that you should even think I was implying that ...

But right, it's a possible issue which ought to be addressed. It depends I suppose on your experience of life. I don't mean to imply that I'm personally a victim but I went to a school some 50 years back where there certainly were victims. It's in that sense I am a realist.

But I'm wondering if there are schools with computer departments essentially making a public nuisance of themselves with Wikipedia. I imagine a teacher who has gained some footing in the Wikipedia admin hierarchy, possibly an admin, who introduces his students to Wikipedia and then grants them permissions, that kind of thing.

My own prejudice is that school students shouldn't be involving themselves with Wikipedia very much. It's not an acadmic resource and on the evidence of the juveniles who recently had a go at me (it seems they thought I'm some sort of a sock puppet oh lordy lordy lord) there are juveniles out there in their final couple of years of study who are already addicted to Wikipedia, making dozens, even hundreds of edits daily and to the detriment of their studies obviously. All of the ones I looked at clearly ambitious to become admins, one of them actually trying to set up a RfA with just 81 edits. And all of them, I don't really know quite how to put it, exceptionally agressive in their zealotry for Wikipedia.

It's deeply pathetic and rather worrying. I mean teenagers are necessarily immature in their judgements, however brilliant they might be as scholars.

Why are they addicted? Perhaps they're doing poorly in classes and they try to compensate with contributions which, in their own head, are benefiting others.

Yes that's so of course, and indeed there may be many reasons. But when you are looking at dozens of edits each and every day, at all hours of the day and night spanning a full sixteen hours and more, even on presumed national holidays such as Christmas and Eid ul-Fitr, then I think you are looking at behaviour you can describe as addictive. And you can see this pattern already in these young editors.

To become an administrator, the stated aim of many of these young editors (because they put the [[Template:User wikipedia/Administrator someday]] as one of the forest of "This user ..." boxes that typically litter their user pages), you generally have to make several thousand edits. Some of them accomplish this in months.

Yes, they make the required quantity of edits, OK. The quality is another matter. But who cares? I've been around WP:RfA long enough to know that quality is scarcely a factor. It's been suggested more than once that RfA candidates should have at least one FA. Apart from giving too much power to the FA Cabal, I'd doubt that getting one FA would prove all that much.