Gerard Meijssen wrote:
As the discussions about all these plans is going to
be in English, it will
be very much "others" telling communities how to behave, how to move
forward. The notion that policies and guidelines are good is offset by
people who found themselves not or no longer welcome and moved away. As this
is already true for English language projects, you may appreciate that the
notion that "the" rules and guidelines are beneficial is just wrong when you
try to project them on other projects.
That's why the most broadly applicable rules need to be very few and to
be very broadly flexible. Anglo-cultural dominance is far more
insidious than anglophonic dominance.
When you want to transcend local policies and
guidelines, you have to start
thinking on a more global level. On this level there are big and small
Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, Wikibooks etc. There are projects that serve a
global need and are the victim of local constraints like Commons and also
Meta. We are not organised in a way that gives priority to the more global
issues and consequently we are very much unaware of issues that the "others"
face and why our "local" issues can be irrelevant elsewhere. Given this lack
of awareness there are few low hanging fruits because we forgot to bring the
bees to the orchard.
When the hive mind becomes too crowded the bees set off to
found new
colonies. Maybe we should be encouraging more forks.
Ec