On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Ricordisamoa <ricordisamoa(a)openmailbox.org>
wrote:
<hopeless>I'd really like to hear
Jimbo's opinion on the matter</hopeless>
A few years ago, Jimbo came by en.wn, and we were trying to explain to him
how our project infrastructure works. Understand, a central part of our
concept at en.wn is that the community chooses reviewers in whom we place
an enormous amount of trust. Of course I can't know what the exchange
looked like from Jimbo's side, but from where I was sitting, it appeared
that as we were explaining to him how this works, at first he was
incredulous we were actually putting that much trust in the hands of users
merely selected by the community, and then, when he did realize what we
were entrusting to reviewers, he reckoned we had to be insane. As I say, I
don't know what it looked like from his perspective; but it sure did look
like that from mine.
This attitude, of not trusting the community to select people worthy of
trust, seems to be a sort of conceptual trap, that's easy to fall into,
probably without even noticing, and hard to get out of. One suspects it's
got a bunch of folks at the Foundation in its grip. It makes a striking
contrast with "assume good faith" --- mind you, I don't subscribe to AGF,
in fact at en.wn we have instead "Never assume"; but one of the subtler
reasons I disapprove of AGF is that I think it actually transmutes, in
practice, into "trust no-one".
Pi zero