On Mar 30, 2007, at 7:27 PM, Kelly Martin wrote:
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their SWG.
This is a response to the scaling problem. The English Wikipedia's community has grown too large to function organically the way it used to three years ago. It is my belief that breaking it up into multiple subject-oriented communities will help to combat the scaling problem: the members of the SWG will all know one another and are far more likely to remain collegial and productive with one another. A SWG that gets too large can be subdivided further, which means this provides an ongoing solution to the scaling problem, not just a one-time fix.
This is already happening where is needed. Trying to impose this on the whole of en.wiki would be a mistake. Let it grow organically. If there are people that want to get together and form an SWG, nothing is stopping them. Should we encourage them to form one of they do not feel like, of course not. If there is something we need less is bureaucracy. Personal responsibility cannot be neither policed nor encouraged by rules.
-- Jossi