On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner@wikimedia.org> wrote:

So I would conclude that the lesson for Wikimedia in that, is that if
the community makes something a priority, and continually reinforces
it, then culture change can be achieved. I find this heartening
because I think the people at Metafilter are fairly similar to the
people at Wikimedia: speaking super-loosely, both groups are very
smart, kind of stubborn and a little fighty, pride themselves on being
rational and not uncritically buying into received/conventional
wisdom, and are iconoclastic by nature.

[snip]

So I find Jessamyn's story encouraging. And it seems to me that the
people here might be able to take on informal leadership roles in
helping moderate the community overall, to achieve better openness to
women.

Let me point out here that Mefi has one very large advantage that Wikimedia doesn't: it is able to operate, in cases like this, from the top down. The mods decided to nip the boyzone in the bud, and they have the acknowledged authority to do things like delete posts, give users warnings or times-out, and state definitively what behavior they will and won't accept. We lack that luxury on WMF projects; by design we HAVE no top-down authority. In theory, there could exist a consensus among administrators that boyzone behaviors X, Y, and Z are not acceptable, but even assuming the cats could be herded to that point (which I think we can all agree is extremely unlikely), and that they could agree on where exactly the line lies, those enforcing such a system would be subject to near-abusive levels of, er...vociferous disagreement. They'd be "cowboy admins", they'd be "the civility police", they'd be "the PC-police", and the whole thing would just get shouted down. "Informal leadership roles" will not allow anyone to do the sorts of things Mefi mods do.

In short, we work on a basis of coherence-through-chaos, which works well in the large but makes it nearly impossible to do anything similar to what Jessamyn & co are able to do on Metafilter.

-User:Fluffernutter