On 3/21/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Likely lesson: Wikipedia has exceeded process critical mass. We now have more things going on more quickly than the existing static process can adequately track and keep people aware of.
In a business, this sort of discovery triggers a round of executive and management soul-searching, followed by a painful round of process consultants, executive retreats, the creation of new business process management groups, a couple of new VPs, etc etc.
While I seem to remember some quote about the dangers of bureaucratic mentality and its normative habit of forming committee's and instituting more process and bloat, I don't think it improper to deal with these issues in a more formal way.
Part of the problem is noise: the methods by which we communicate openly are cluttered with noise, be it trolling, newbiance, misconceptions, or just spam and bad email formatting.
A more comprehensive topic based threading system would seem to be useful, not just for meta discussion on the mailing lists, but on certain busy talk pages as well. This is a technical issue which Erik alluded to with his comments about OTRS (and Wikipedia as a primary source.) An ideal system would be organizable, flag-able and integrable between email and wiki formats: an integration of messages and documents.
The other problem is as many have said, scaling the structures of governance to fit the larger community. I'm of the opinion that certain community-style things could be done to accomplish this, but I'm likewise skeptical that such would just be more bureaucracy. We can of course try to visualise an expanded governance model: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/07/Org_chart.jpg/300px-Org_chart....
-Stevertigo