2008/4/24 michael west <michawest(a)gmail.com>om>:
Forgive me - is this some kind of English phrased in a
way many editors
would not understand? or am I think/stupid?
It's stilted, but it seems comprehensible enough to me. However, have
a quick precis of each bit...
*Wikipedia's traditional governance model has
failed to scale adequately
with the project's growth, and has become incapable of operating effectively
in a project orders of magnitude larger than it was at the time the model
was adopted.*
a) The system of government, control, discussion etc that we have doesn't scale.
b) [Because it doesn't scale] it has now reached a point where it's
broken down, because we're so damned big.
*Internally-motivated policy formation has effectively
stagnated. The last
major changes to the main body of policy--the BLP policy and the non-free
content policy--were both essentially imposed from the outside, due to
external pressure on the project. Major internally-driven policy proposals,
such as the attribution policy, have failed to result in anything but the
predictable "no consensus" outcome.*
a) The community has basically stopped being able to change policy in
any significant way.
b) The last major changes to happen to the way we do things were the
BLP and fair-use policy changes, and they were basically Orders From
On High, not changes originated by the community.
c) Any attempts by the community to make major policy changes just end
up stalling due to the fact that it's very hard to get consensus; see
a).
*This is, in some sense, inevitable in a project with
a perpetually open set
of individuals available to participate. Policy debate becomes, in most
cases, nothing more than an endurance contest between those who wish to
effect some change and those who wish to retain the status quo; and, so long
as those opposed to any proposal are sufficiently dedicated and sufficiently
vocal, they can keep the debate going without any effective means being
available to force a decision. The few attempts to do so by means of a
general referendum have proven ineffective.*
a) Meaningful consensus is hard when you have lots of people, more of
them turning up all the time, and no real consistency in that
population.
b) Our current system means that anyone who doesn't like a change can
basically stall it forever, with no way to easily move on.
c) We've tried mass votes to get past this, but they haven't worked.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk