Jay Converse wrote:
I disagree with this assessment entirely. I highly
doubt the community
would support secret decision making. A consensus would be immensely hard
to reach simply because you and 15 people go "Well we discussed this and we
have our reasons". I highly doubt the community would stand for that at
all.
I share Tim's concerns. "Secret decision making" is rarely so
explicit
as you suggest. The "15 people" don't normally issue a manifesto of
their common views that they will defend as an organized group. Common
unspoken understandings develop as a function of working together.
Certain outlooks begin to make more sense to the point where alternate
suggestions in the wider world seem irrational. Communities do stand
for it because nobody, including the in-group members, realizes that
it's happening.
Maintaining democratic structures is an extremely difficult challenge
since most models do not scale very well. Many people like to make
decisions and have the matter behind them, never to be visited again.
Most decisions in themselves aren't controversial at all; many are based
on conventions where an alternate decision would have worked equally
well. In North America the basic rule when installing the electrical
wiring for a house is that the wire at ground potential has white
insulation, and the live wire has black insulation. There is no reason
why the reverse won't work equally well. People easily accept this rule
when the potential safety problems of a mixed installation are raised.
Of course safety is not always so available as an overriding
consideration. Sometimes people need to feel that they are a part of a
decision that was effectively made long before they joined. Most of the
time people will objectively agree with the established consensu.
Consensus needs a temporal as well as a planar dimension.
I see the channel as a way to quickly get help for
administrative duties
that non-admins can't provide help on. As a relatively new admin, I run
into new problems that I can't figure out myself on a semi-frequent basis.
It'd be nice to have the availability of a dedicated admin group to respond
in a much more immediate way than talk pages. I personally happen to prefer
IRC correspondence to talk page correspondence for quick issues.
I don't think that the main effect of this function will be a glorified
help page.
The one thing that'd immediately turn me off of the
idea of this channel is
if it becomes clear that the person in charge of the inviting won't invite
you simply for being an admin. There's a difference between a chat room and
a clique room.
That's an excellent first chink in the armour; the other objections
easily build from that. Faction building is alive and well.
Ec
On 1/22/06, Tim Starling <t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>The IRC channel #wikipedia-en-admins has now been created, with mode +is,
>i.e. secret and
>invite-only. It currently has an access list of 64 people. I am opposed to
>its existence. To call a
>forum which admits 800 people "almost public" is bizarre. You admit 800
>but you exclude thousands of
>active contributors. Wikipedia has always attempted to encourage newcomers
>and to assume good faith,
>but it's a clear violation of that principle to assume that the rest of
>the world, those 6 billion
>non-administrators, have nothing useful to contribute to the discussions
>we wish to undertake.
>
>Imagine if you joined Wikipedia today. How would you feel about the
>formidable barriers against your
>potential contribution to Wikipedia's decision-making process? How would
>you feel about having tens
>of admins declaring new policy, stating their rationale but refusing to
>enter into discussion with
>you on equal terms, on the basis that it had already been decided in
>private?
>