Jay Converse wrote:
I disagree with this assessment entirely. I highly doubt the community would support secret decision making. A consensus would be immensely hard to reach simply because you and 15 people go "Well we discussed this and we have our reasons". I highly doubt the community would stand for that at all.
I share Tim's concerns. "Secret decision making" is rarely so explicit as you suggest. The "15 people" don't normally issue a manifesto of their common views that they will defend as an organized group. Common unspoken understandings develop as a function of working together. Certain outlooks begin to make more sense to the point where alternate suggestions in the wider world seem irrational. Communities do stand for it because nobody, including the in-group members, realizes that it's happening.
Maintaining democratic structures is an extremely difficult challenge since most models do not scale very well. Many people like to make decisions and have the matter behind them, never to be visited again. Most decisions in themselves aren't controversial at all; many are based on conventions where an alternate decision would have worked equally well. In North America the basic rule when installing the electrical wiring for a house is that the wire at ground potential has white insulation, and the live wire has black insulation. There is no reason why the reverse won't work equally well. People easily accept this rule when the potential safety problems of a mixed installation are raised.
Of course safety is not always so available as an overriding consideration. Sometimes people need to feel that they are a part of a decision that was effectively made long before they joined. Most of the time people will objectively agree with the established consensu. Consensus needs a temporal as well as a planar dimension.
I see the channel as a way to quickly get help for administrative duties that non-admins can't provide help on. As a relatively new admin, I run into new problems that I can't figure out myself on a semi-frequent basis. It'd be nice to have the availability of a dedicated admin group to respond in a much more immediate way than talk pages. I personally happen to prefer IRC correspondence to talk page correspondence for quick issues.
I don't think that the main effect of this function will be a glorified help page.
The one thing that'd immediately turn me off of the idea of this channel is if it becomes clear that the person in charge of the inviting won't invite you simply for being an admin. There's a difference between a chat room and a clique room.
That's an excellent first chink in the armour; the other objections easily build from that. Faction building is alive and well.
Ec
On 1/22/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
The IRC channel #wikipedia-en-admins has now been created, with mode +is, i.e. secret and invite-only. It currently has an access list of 64 people. I am opposed to its existence. To call a forum which admits 800 people "almost public" is bizarre. You admit 800 but you exclude thousands of active contributors. Wikipedia has always attempted to encourage newcomers and to assume good faith, but it's a clear violation of that principle to assume that the rest of the world, those 6 billion non-administrators, have nothing useful to contribute to the discussions we wish to undertake.
Imagine if you joined Wikipedia today. How would you feel about the formidable barriers against your potential contribution to Wikipedia's decision-making process? How would you feel about having tens of admins declaring new policy, stating their rationale but refusing to enter into discussion with you on equal terms, on the basis that it had already been decided in private?