Stan Shebs wrote:
Oldak Quill wrote:
On 24/07/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
That's a nice fantasy, but nobody works for no reward at all. For instance, we reward random editors by letting their contributions appear on a top-20 website; editors who continually have all their edits reverted eventually get the hint and go away. If every policy I propose gets shot down or subverted, how long do you think I'm going to keep doing it?
I'm not saying there should be no reward. As you say, the reward is helping the project, getting a featured article, getting a policy through, or devising a new way to collaborate.
My point was that we don't want leaders who are leaders only because they enjoy the perks. Our current system ensures that our transient, changing leadership are those who want to do something for the project, or believe the project should have some feature or device. Institutionalised leadership tends lose sight of the project and be lazy.
Your repeated references to "perks" are revealing; leadership is not about the leader getting some kind of unfair advantage over others, it's about getting groups of people to work together, rather than at cross-purposes. Transient leadership is ineffective - think of the Italian government - instead of working out compromises, people who disagree simply wait for the leader to be gone and the group to disperse, then undo everything that they accomplished. We see this every day, in the endless circular arguments on notability, verifiability, userboxes, fair use, capitalization of species names, AfD, and on and on and on, which are in turn reflected in a continuous churn of edits that never actually add any new content. We could be a lot more effective at the ultimate goal if we actually encouraged people to make tough decisions, then backed them up rather than tore them down.
I fundamentally agree. Political leaders with an eye on the perks are too likely to have their decisions affected by this perspective. Leadership is a quality of personality, and not something that is automatically generated in the appointment process.
Transient leadership is one of the biggest failings in democratic systems. When the motivation for taking actions derives from the ability to get re-elected on the next ballot public policy suffers. The ability to view things beyond the next election is especially important in environmental matters.
Four years ago the compromise understanding about the capitalization of species names was that you could use either form as long as you allowed for a redirect of the other. I hadn't realized that people were still whining about that. :-)
There's a lot of support for tough decisions where those decisions support one's own POV. ;-)
Perhaps my biggest complaint about 3RR was the imposed artificiality. It serves well for cooling down an immediate battle, but offers no long range solution for settling a dispute. If you apply it often enough perhaps no-one will notice that all you have done is sweep the problem under the rug.
Ec