2008/10/20 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>et>: Been done. Compare wikipedia to most other user cotrib sites on the web. The level of consistency very high indeed. Partly because of the shear number of bot edits. No. Absolutely not. If people want stability they read EB1911. People want articles to be up to date. The other things is that are articles are actually for the most part pretty stable. Step away from the main articles and you can go years only seeing bot edits. In terms of size Hoodong is getting rather close. Certainly. Would that be the organisation that deletes a bunch of articles that people want or the one that protects problematical uses because they appear to be experts. Which makes it rather odd that you want to see it's death. -- geni

2008/10/21 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>et>: Really? Wikipedia is a web project for the time being. One of the rules for surviving on the web as a major site is innovate or die. You first call is for consistency On the face of it this is weird. Consider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_B._Reeves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landseer_(dog) Both have text down the left infoboxes on the right and use the standard style headings. Landseer_(dog) has the same type of stub notice you see all over wikipedia and the same type of Navbox style you see all over wikipedia. Where it gets interesting is when we look at the infoboxes. The one in Christopher_B._Reeves is a horrible wikimarkup construct while the one in Landseer_(dog) is a cleaner one built useing template call. Inconsistency brought about by innovation. Infoboxes appear to be liked by readers and editors yet at one point they would have been an innovation and inconsistent. The diagram in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergiant#Characteristics is inconsistent in that it contains active links (while others do exist they are a subject of dispute). Again innovation. Your second call for stability Now you say some unidentified group of people serious people want stability. Thing is groups we actually know a bit about don't want stability. Articles relevant to current events tend to be the most popular. Would you want to read a year old article on the Miller-Urey experiment more than an up to date one? Our Hurricane Katrina article family was widely popular because it stayed up to date. Our actual readers do not value stability. What about our writers. Well some put together articles in their userspace but going by the number that are expanded from an initial stub in the article namespace it would appear most do not value stability over the ability to get stuff out there. Stability ultimately will tend to kill innovation but the problems appear much sooner. Problem is see that conventional structured organizations produce an unreasonably high overhead. They also tend to require people to stick around which again you can't really guarantee on wikipedia. To use the current example your problem appears to be that the decision was made by a small number of people. First problem is that isn't actually true. It started with MOS yes but then there would have been bot approval there were a couple of WP:AN (or AN/I can't recall which) cases (where I initially opposed it for various reasons). Secondly there is no way you are going to get more interest than that. Decisions are made all the time and most of them are pretty boring. Trying to force people to go out and get more people interested wont work because either people will ignore the attempt completely or result in effective attempts (usertalk page spam is unpopular and Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy) doesn't have a very high readership) Third in a volunteer environment organisation systems that centralise authority are bad for innovation (not ideal in commercial organisations but there are ways around that). If I have to work my way through some central authority I'm more likely to give up. Decisions are in many ways best made by the people the outcome is going to make the biggest impact on. In this case that would be the MOS people who run bots and semi automated tools to try and get wikipedia articles close to the MOS. Their decisions was latter challenged by other sections of the community but so far it has been upheld. We are increasingly integrating video and sound at the moment. The best people to make decisions about how it should be deployed are probably those actively creating the stuff and putting it in article not some centeralised organisation. -- geni

on 10/21/08 3:55 AM, Delirium at delirium(a)hackish.org wrote: Mark, my concerns are with the administration, the leadership (more pointedly, the lack of it) in the Project itself. All that I point out in my statement are symptoms of that lack of leadership. Marc