2009/12/20 Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
Tomasz Ganicz wrote:
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.
Well, My "story" is quite obviously just a simplification of the long
history. For me the first contact with meta was in 2002 and it was
about some sort of strategy planning - the discussion of the "second
stage of Wikipedia" - i.e. the idea of cleaning-up the Wikipedia as it
become large enough to be called a real encyclopedia :-) (roughly 100
000 articles). The second contact was at 2003 when we were voting for
"ambassador" of Polish Wikipedia. Anyway - what is my main point is
that the consensus/voting system in meta - was based on an idea that
there is a kind of meta-community, a large group of people interested
to look at Wikimedia movement as a whole, which has their origins in
various Wikimedia project's communities, not only English Wikipedia
and not only Wikipedias. In fact, it was always 90%+ English Wikipedia
community + 9%+ major other languages Wikipedia's communities members
+ less than 1% of minor languages Wikipedia's and other Wikimedia
project's communities. Therefore that system never worked effectively
- as there was never such a real meta-community which could
effectively represent the general Wikimedia projects' editors
community of communities.
--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html