2009/12/20 Laura Hale <laura(a)fanhistory.com>om>:
This was posted to the Strategy wiki but I
don't think I ever mentioned it
on list. The case study itself can be found at
http://www.fanhistory.com/FHproposal.pdf . The blog entry about the case
study can be found at
http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1103 .
I think the study shows the old problems, which mainly comes from
Wikimedia/Wikipedia history.
Meta wiki was first created as a place for meta-cross-project
discussions including strategy planning as well. Then there was an
assumption (IMHO false) that there is some sort of
meta-cross-language-cross-projects-community which is allowed to make
vital decisions by the system of consensus process mixed with voting
system.It was soon found silly and many decisions were moved to
Wikimedia committees that theoretically were created just as
"advisory bodies" for Wikimedia Board of Trustees, but in fact the
advice given by the committees was usually accepted by the Board.
Note that Meta was founded in 2001, so it significantly predates the
Foundation and the non-Wikipedia projects. So the idea that
decision-making there was "soon found silly" is a bit of an
exaggeration. It predates the namespace feature in MediaWiki; it
originally had a role similar to the Help and Wikipedia namespaces on
the English Wikipedia today.
-- Tim Starling