[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors}

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 6:54 PM, Marc Riddell
<michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>[...]
> And if changes were proposed to this present system, who (or what entity)
> would approve and implement them?

The community, by consensus, for approval.  Whoever chose to
participate and was allowed to do so, for implementation.

Part of the greater problem is that self-selection by interest (our
current mechanism for involvement in change and implementation) does
not select for competence or for agreement with the consensus (or with
what the consensus stands for).

We lack a functional dictator (or president) to cut the knot and enact
efficiently; Jimmy might be able to do so, but burned a lot of his
"street cred" with the community writ large with the incident that led
to reductions in founder bit authority.  I personally disagree with
that, but I see a clear problem with community accepting his fiat now.
 Facing any significant opposition his position would not be an
effective tiebreaker.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com