Political wonks are fascinated by process. They love the game. They get as much satisfaction from observing as changing. They want to be players above all else. Ideals bore them. History is mere data. Intellectuals seem irrelevant. What matters to the wonk are the hard realities of the ongoing political struggle. They defer to title and rank. They thrive on meetings, small victories, administrative details, and gossip about these matters. Knowing who is who and what is what is the very pith of life.

Geeks, on the other hand:

They are no less fascinated by detail but are drawn to ideals. Observation alone bores them. They are drawn to the prospect of change. They don't want to be players as such; they question the very rules of the game and want to change them. They are happy to make a difference in the ideological infrastructure, whether big or small. They tend to work alone and totally disregard caste distinctions.

As to your frustration with Wikipedia’s political elite

The wonks are the ones who consolidate, stabilize, and entrench the status quo; the geeks are the ones who prepare revolutionary change. The wonks freeze it into place and make it work more efficiently; the geeks imagine and work toward a future that no one thought was possible. The wonks rule out drastic and extreme measures as imprudent and reckless; they geeks think these paths are the only ones worth pursing, and have confidence that the unknown future will somehow work itself out. The wonks try to bring the king around to their point of view; the geeks kill the king.

Tucker describes the conflict between the two camps.

The geeks and wonks can work together but there will always be a natural tensions between the two. The wonks think the geeks are hopeless, powerless, reckless outsiders whose heads are full of useless and unrealistic fantasies. The geeks think that the wonks are part of the system and, therefore, more than likely corrupted by it, and increasingly so.

Broadening the view, the struggle to control history is a battle between the wonks and the geeks …

According to his view, Julius Caesar represented the wonks and Brutus the geeks in Ancient Rome. In the America’s revolutionary generation, they were Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

(1) the terminology adopted is hostile to the pre-established usage—in politics, the term “wonk” is almost exactly equivalent to the general use term “geek” and occurs most frequently in the phrase “policy wonk”, which it is taken to refer to when used alone. It almost means the opposite of a person obsessed with process but unconcerned with ideals and output. (“Almost” because policy wonks often extend their concern with policy to the mechanisms by which policy proposals are implemented, so they aren't necessarily unconcerned with process.) It's publicly visible uses have been about politicians who are perceived get into the tiny details of policy rather than confining themselves to the process lane the way people expect politicians to (Bill Clinton was a notable example.) And while “geeks” is rarely used about any obsession with a political subject matter, where I have seen it used, it's been consistently about people who are obsessed with polling and process dynamics, very commonly media analysts or hired-gun political consultants, whose only concern with policy is can it pass and what votes will it win or cost for the people visibly supporting or opposing it.

(2) The specific examples are not so good; most notably, the idea that Hamilton was concerned only with process and not ideals (or that Jefferson was focussed on ideals and not process) is ludicrous.

The battle to control history isn't between people focussed on process and those focussed on ideals, its between different ideals. The people focussed only on process are observers or mercenaries, not a side of the battle of their own.

And make it dysfunctional, because it's too busy serving itself.

Once most of the pioneering work is done, and the low hanging articles are written, a community needs to decide how to proceed. Who are you going to maximize value for? In the early days it makes sense to focus on what is the rarest resource (in SO's case, probably the answerers) but as a community matures, the focus can shift. Now it is frankly the anonymous viewer that it makes sense to optimize for, both from a monetary standpoint (jobs display being a primary monetization strategy) and a social good standpoint (far more anonymous viewers than either askers or answerers).

http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-tow...

To address this issue, I put together a "deep-cuts" algorithm that uses the API to tries to find overlooked higher quality questions that have yet to be answered.

The code is available here:

https://github.com/klenwell/stack-overflow-deep-cuts/blob/ma...

It's not perfect. But if you're looking to engage with Stack Overflow, I've found it much more useful than the rat-race to answer (or close) new questions.

And some pairs do better/worse than others: http://minimaxir.com/img/stack-overflow-tags/so_tag_adjacenc...

I agree with your observation but Jon Skeet's essay seemed to be focusing on something else... the culture of hostility (or perceived hostility). The key words I noticed he used (multiple times) were "hostility", "jerks", "feelings".

On the other hand, the keywords I would associate with your observation would be... "boredom", "novelty of a new website", "low hanging fruit to quickly build easy karma", etc.

To discuss Jon's specific angle, let's use an example of a [tag] that's fairly new technology such as "[vue.js]". Since Vue is 2014, it doesn't have the "completeness of answers" of a very old tag like C# from 2008.

Here's a Vue question sitting downvoted to negative 4: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49345098/how-to-get-prop...

Maybe his question deserved all those downvotes. I don't know enough about Vue to guess if the downvotes were all caused by a pasted screenshot instead of pure text.

To Jon's "culture" essay, is the minus-4 the optimal way to communicate it's a "bad" question? Is it a bad question because of its format (the screenshot) or was it bad because "props" is a trivial LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You Question)?

Here's another Vue question at negative 1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49321665/how-to-add-a-ge...

To generalize, if there's "[new technology]" that opens a vast untaken area for new contributions of answers, is the culture created by Stackoverflow's mechanisms (the downvotes, the karma system, the moderators' powers, the "closings" vs "moving", etc) ... the best incentive system to minimize hostility?

Are Jon's well-intentioned "covenants" realistic? Or are they naive to human tendencies when any website is open to mass participation?

The downvote button is marked "shows no research effort".

Where's the "I looked at this manual and that tutorial and this debugger and tried these things"? Nowhere, which makes it feel like "I put no effort in stackoverflow do it for me".

The downvote button is an awful way to do what it purports to do. In practise it's percieved as more of an "oh fuck off" button.

It's a single mouse click by a single person (or maybe a bot), but it carries so much weight.

Yeah, one of SO's problems is people using its question system to cache-hit other people's brains instead of having to spend 2 seconds on google.

I can't really agree with any posts here that think the solution is to tolerate it with poor question quality and duplicates. But good luck doing that in a way that doesn't grate on anyone.

Personally I try to use my downvotes only as a last resort, for factually wrong answers or questions where clarification attempts went nowhere.

[edit] I should have done my research before asking the question :P Apparently downvoting on S.O. does cost reputation/points. I guess the actual cost is so small it seems to be in the doesn't-matter category, at least for me as I didn't even notice. Perhaps if the cost was higher...

[edit2] I looked it up, and the cost is indeed trivial - one point. An upvote on your answer provides 10 points, and you can of course receive many upvotes for a good answer. The cost of downvoting is really only significant for a new/low reputation user. High reputation users can still be poor-downvoters. Seems to me there's a lot of opportunity to tweak the costs of downvoting to reduce the negative aspects of it.

You need 125 rep to be able to cast a down vote (votes for people and anonymous users with less than 125 are recorded in an anonymous votes table ( for example, http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/209365/ano... ).

Hacker News has down votes too... and you can't down vote until you get a certain amount of karma.

The rep lost from down votes are an investment in site quality that you get back if the post is deleted.

Maybe that's not how most people do it?

I have several well recived answers there but I have never downvoted anyone because leaving it as is feels right than downvoting for the reasons you mentioned. I never asked a question there and tried figuring out the answers based on existing resources and on my own and it helped me learning a lot. This might not be the right way but being hostile and downvoting feels more than disagreement to me. This is the reason why I avoid being there.

The guy is a legend. If there was ever an MVP in the C#/.NET space, it's this guy. His books are great too.

he has (had?) some competition from eric lippert. i used to love reading his blog when i did c# work.