On Wednesday 20 August 2003 05:07, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
And these written policies are apparently developed in back rooms with no input from the community. Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the unwashed masses.
I don't agree with either of these sentences.
No, I'm sure you don't -- they are not there for anyone to agree with, they are there to attempt to make my point.
I don't see any way for our policy development process to be any more open to input from the community. I can't think of a less secretive or more noisy way to organize anything. There are no back rooms here -- everything is done in public, with wide advertising throughout the system of how it's done. We're always open to suggestions, of course, but I think the system right now is a model of public accountability.
Except mav suddenly seems to think that a unilateral policy change without any discussion or even notice is OK. I don't remember that little detail being advertised anywhere in the system.
The second sentence bewilders me completely. What do your scare quotes around 'policy' mean?
They mean I'm assuming mav doesn't realize the full implications of what he's arguing for.
What do you mean by 'forcing openness'? Somehow our openness is *imposed* on the world?
I'm unsurprised that this confused you, it wasn't the best way to put it. But it's being forced upon those that should have had a say in the policy and did not.
And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion of 'unwashed masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook. The very foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate hierarchies of control.
The hierarchy that appears to have fallen into place unplanned is not elaborate at all. It has two levels: Admins - Others.
An admin made a unilateral policy change, and it's being essentially ignored or defended by other admins on the grounds that they think the policy is a good one.
One wonders what would have happened if *I* had made a unilateral policy change.