On 21/03/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
I try to land in the center on most issues,
rather than staking out any sort of extreme positions. And I try to
represent all parts of the community's interest in the broad building of
consensus as being better than gang warfare.
Would this involve taking action if that subset of the Wikipedia community
who choose to be involved in decision-making took decisions that were not
sensible?
Wikipedia is not a democracy. This is both a good and a bad thing; I'm
concerned that thus far we've just been fortunate in the balance of
decision-makers. If more rational decision-makers stopped being involved,
Wikipedia will run into problems.
Certainly one could argue that certain categories of action are restricted
to admins, who have to be approved as such. The flaw is that they are
approved by the subset of existing admins who choose to be involved in those
decisions.
Long term this will undoubtedly result in a definite "type" of person who is
involved in decision-making on Wikipedia; it won't be representative (which
as I mentioned, is not entirely a bad thing, but there are reasons people
often choose a democratic model).
I've serious concerns about the direction Wikipedia is going, I don't think
it is sustainable.
Zoney
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