User:HJ Mitchell/Rant

The way to rise to prominence on Wikipedia, as with any other community - especially communities built around a shared objective - is HARD WORK. You have to CONTRIBUTE to the shared objective (in this case an encyclopaedia). Gradually, tough your contributions, you will be exposed to some of the inner workings of that community and you will earn the respect of your peers. FOR YOUR WORK, not because there's some conspiracy. As you gradually get involved in the inner workings, you may find yourself expressing opinions about meta aspects of the community, but remember always that those discussions take place to aid the community in its work, and are not the primary of the community. As you participate more in these discussions and contribute to some of the inner workings (while still contributing to the primary aim of the community) you will find that your opinion starts to hold more weight, that people begin to admire you and your work, and that you become better known within that community. People come to you for advice or help, and you find yourself taking on greater responsibility for the running of whatever the project the community is built around.

Eventually, probably after a period of years, you will find that you become the 'go-to' person for certain things, and that you have the admiration of people you don't know, and you've done so many things over such a long period that you don't know what, specifically, you did to earn any individual's admiration (or even whether you deserve it). Your focus may shift away from contributing directly to the community's objective and towards enabling others to do so, or removing those with nefarious intent from that community, but all the while your motivation in doing all the things you do will be to contribute in some way towards that overarching shared objective. You may occasionally disagree with your colleagues - sometimes heatedly - about the best direction to take in order to reach that objective, but you never doubt (and indeed appreciate) your colleagues' sincerity, nor they yours.

It's not a mystery, and in my experience, the only people who fail to grasp this are those with nefarious intent or those who want to move from the fringes to a position of prominence but bypassing the hard work. People who join a community and immediately dive into its meta aspects, telling other members that the community needs to get its house in order or spend more time on internal politics ARE A PROBLEM and unless they start contributing to the shared objective, they will quickly outstay their welcome. Unfortunately Wikipedians, being generally good-natured people (but who find rigorous discussion stimulating, to put it politely), tend to be far too tolerant of people who have no interest in contributing to the encyclopaedia, and just want to stir the shit on admins' noticeboards.