On 3/22/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Outsiders often imagine that we have a much greater degree of procedure than we actually do. We have a group of friends working under "rough consensus and running code" and decision-making is highly distributed and what may appear to be lines of authority are often merely lines of respect and thoughtfulness.
In the case of "nofollow"... to the best of my knowledge, the history is that it was implemented without my knowledge or approval (which is normal and fine) in various (some? all? depending on local opinion?) languages except en.wikipedia.org. There were discussions about it, both public and private, and I expressed my own concerns about it. Out of respect for me, the implementation was delayed for a long time on English Wikipedia while I talked to Matt Cutts at google about it.
Not that simple:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Nofollow#Implementation_of_the_vote
(BTW, Brion would know when and why nofollow was implemented elsewhere.)
March 6, 2005
Matt recommended that we use it, and I reconsidered various arguments that people had made about it, and I dropped my objections to it. Sometime later, Brion Vibber, acting on his own authority as CTO and the leader of his own part of the whole Wikipedia beast, went ahead and implemented it. (Did I ask him to do it, or did he notice my dropping my objections and just do it? I don't remember but the question really misses the point.)
"Having been requested by Jimmy to do so"
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-January/061137.html
No evidences of his acting on his own authority.
Now, you can imagine this as an instance of me being the decider, but I think the truth is a lot more complex... and a lot more wonderful... than that image would suggest.
No it isn't. You took an action (that has had minimal impact due to spamming for traffic) that the community had debated in the past and had not come to a consensus to support.