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

[Marc Riddell]

> On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>
> wrote:
>>> People agree and support the decision.
>>> 
>> Fred, who are these people that are making these decisions and declaring
>> that there in Community consensus, knowing that this "consensus" cannot be
>> factually validated?

on 2/1/11 10:34 PM, George Herbert at george.herbert at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> It is in the nature of online collaborative communities that this
> general question has no exact answer.
> 
> This is fundamentally unsatisfying to a number of people, including
> those who prefer various not-yet-universally-supported changes;
> scientists, observers, critics, and journalists from outside the
> community trying to understand or quantify it; many others.
> 
> That's the way it works, though.
> 
> I appreciate your point, which is that this way of doing things is
> often infuriating, insane, or impossible to actually get anything done
> in.  The reality is that we're there.  That's how Wikipedia works (for
> whatever definition of "work" you care to apply to the state of the
> project here, which you and others feel are unsatisfactory).

George, it may be "how it works", but it also misleading - or worse. To
state that any decision made in this manner is a "consensus of the Wikipedia
Community" is fundamentally dishonest.

Marc