There are also de facto projects. For example, the few people who
devote themselves to TfD, or the ones grouped around image fair use.
Or, as George Herbert implied, the ones who assemble here.
Or at AfD--people specialize, and the only person who attempted to
comment on them all just got indefinitely blocked as an SPA, to
general relief.
There are of course problems with multiple self-organizing
mini-groups--for one, they get isolated; I found out by accident just
now that a major question which is just beginning to be discussed at
one place has been almost fully decided & implemented at another.
For another, one persona can dominate, and then there are no fixed
limits on what they can consider their scope.
There is no way to deal with this many things going on without a
considerable human overhead--at present it's done by volunteers from
the ordinary people, selected by interest and perseverance and
thickness of skin--in your model, they'd be selected from above. Just
whom among the present WP people do you think qualified to do that? Or
are to elect our judges? -- that doesn't have any better a record.
On 6/23/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote:
on 6/23/07 3:39 AM, David Goodman at
dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com wrote:
I see a structure--a cellular structure of groups
that only sometimes
interact. If the group is reasonably small, under 50 or so--of whom in
general 5 to 10 will actually be active, and if the interfaces between
the groups are kept limited and channelized, the organization can
continue.
The cells I have in mind are he Wikiprojects. Many of them work
really well to maintain order in their work (I'm thinking particularly
of Chemistry) and are reasonably hospitable to adequately informed
newcomers. But they work only incidentally with the other groups. they
appear in the general forums when something of critical concern to
them appears, but otherwise they leave the rest of the wiki alone.
Look at most of the admin candidates--they have each of them
contributed substantially only within a scope of a few pages. When the
become admins, they do a little general activity, but most remain
fairly limited even in that. They are like the country members, who
come to the capitol only on special occasion.
David,
Just thinking here: It would seem there are many active editors who are not
formal members of an established WP Project (myself included). This would
include persons who do mostly statistical editing (birth & death dates,
place of birth, sports stats, etc.) as well as grammatical cleanup and the
like. So as to involve all active editors in the Project's organization, how
about grouping them in their own Project?
Marc
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David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.