On 5/11/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
On 08/05/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
We're not professional. Except for a tiny bunch of people who work for the Foundation, we're all volunteers and our time is not especially coordinated. Wikipedia is what it is, and part of that
is
that we've grown faster than our organization has.
Zoney wrote:
The project should be managed professionally if it is indeed a
serious
project.
on 5/9/07 12:22 AM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Absolutely not!!!
Marc Riddell wrote:
Why not, Ray?
on 5/9/07 8:51 PM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The project has had over the last six years proven success despite being run almost exclusively by amateurs.
Being "run" by, or being "constructed" by - there is a big difference. And, six years is the blink of an eye when thinking long term.
It's contents have stood up well in comparisons with what competitive products there are, and where errors and inaccuracies have been noted it has had a remarkable ability for self-correction.
I am in no way referring to the contents of the encyclopedia; that is the creative, living part of the project and that part is superb. I am presenting to the extremely weak structure that is supposed to provide this living part with strength, leadership and shelter. In fact, if the strength of the structure were equal to that of its content, there would be no need for this conversation.
The power of the project is not in the product, but in the process.
I could not possibly disagree with more. When the process is more important than the product it creates, you have an exercise. Is the process of writing it more important than the poem?
In it's crudest manifestation a professional is one who is paid to do a job. It is also a person who has "paid his dues" to the established order, and now has the credentials that permit him to repeat past mistakes.
As for the definition of ³professional², I place far less emphasis on the money being exchanged, and much more on the quality of the product produced. Wikipedia, like many creative entities, must consist of two ³professional² groups, those who create the product, and those who provide the structure and leadership for the other group to function within. In WP, the former group is very much alive and doing very well, the latter one (if it exists at all) is in critical condition, bordering on moribund.
Wikipedia, at present, is a "community" in the loosest definition of the term. Rather, it is a construction crew. But, most significantly, it is a construction crew without a foreman. And they are working, essentially, with only the most basic set of blueprints - both of the project, and of the company they are working for. What working plans they do have can change at the slightest whim of one or more of the workers. And, what started out as a cottage has become the Twin Towers. And, like the Towers, its collapse will be the result of the failure of internal support. But, unlike the Towers, its destruction will not come from something that occurs from without, but from what doesn't occur from within.
At the risk of offending and/or alienating those on the crew with authority problems, the company has chosen to allow the crew to fend for itself.
I have lived in communes in the past; some still flourish today. Its members are the definition of anti-authority thinking. But the ones that succeed are led by persons just as anti-authority in their beliefs as the rest, but have the interpersonal skills and trust of the community to lead.
Wikipedia is not what it started out as - but it is trying to function as though it is.
I had a difficult time putting this post together. Then I discovered it was because I was weary of the subject and I¹ve only been here a little over a year. Do you realize how many times the issue of ³leadership² has been discussed on the Talk Pages and this List!? How many times the subject of ³who¹s in charge² and ³who is Jimmy Wales² and what role does he play in all of this, has been rehashed?
We can flail, commiserate, bemoan, intellectualize, agree, disagreeŠ forever. But, until a leader (that foreman I referred to) is hired, appointed, anointed (or whatever the Foundation does) to actively, and with authority, direct the construction project on a day-to-day basis, the building under construction is a disaster waiting to happen.
For once, I feel that I am in complete agreement with Marc. Consensus doesn't cut it when you have a thousand participants in the discussion rather than a hundred, unless you want to resort to voting - which is effectively a tyranny of the majority.
We need some leaders who can steer this project. Jimbo used to be something of a leader, involved quite a bit in how we crafted our policies, but he's since stepped back and is mainly involved in PR and the occasional policy change for PR purposes (e.g. banning anons from creating new articles). We don't have anyone with a vision of where we are going, and who can steer us and our policies towards that direction.
I'm not saying the community shouldn't be involved in decision-making. But at the same time, I'm not confident that the community can come to a consensus on many of the tough questions facing Wikipedia, because of how controversial these issues are. Whenever there's such a hot-button issue, it's had to come to a point where there are people violating our policies and causing a lot of pain before we can settle the question - thanks to the Arbcom.
Indecision is not always better than making a decision. I'd rather we come to a conclusion on some issues which have been troubling us for a long time - e.g. our deletion processes, our process of granting adminship, how we deal with BLPs, etc. - because even if the conclusion is not to my liking, I have confidence that if we have leader like Jimbo who appreciates the need for change when something isn't working, we will be able to fix the mistakes of our decisions in the long run.
At the moment, we are paralysed on tough questions because when consensus runs into a wall, there's no alternative left. This paralysis is, I think, not entirely desirable, and the only way to end it is to introduce another form of decisionmaking supplementary and/or complementary to the community which can act when consensus doesn't work.
Johnleemk