On 21/03/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I try to land in the center on most issues, rather than staking out any sort of extreme positions. And I try to represent all parts of the community's interest in the broad building of consensus as being better than gang warfare.
Would this involve taking action if that subset of the Wikipedia community who choose to be involved in decision-making took decisions that were not sensible?
Wikipedia is not a democracy. This is both a good and a bad thing; I'm concerned that thus far we've just been fortunate in the balance of decision-makers. If more rational decision-makers stopped being involved, Wikipedia will run into problems.
Certainly one could argue that certain categories of action are restricted to admins, who have to be approved as such. The flaw is that they are approved by the subset of existing admins who choose to be involved in those decisions.
Long term this will undoubtedly result in a definite "type" of person who is involved in decision-making on Wikipedia; it won't be representative (which as I mentioned, is not entirely a bad thing, but there are reasons people often choose a democratic model).
I've serious concerns about the direction Wikipedia is going, I don't think it is sustainable.
Zoney