On 14/03/2008, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
At the moment, I agree. There have been various scandals involving Jimbo lately, but I don't think many Wikipedians believe a word of it (I certainly don't), so I doubt many people would see much point in removing him from power. It is possible that things will change in time - already Jimbo's opinion doesn't always match community consensus, and as consensus changes (or Jimbo's opinion changes), that gap may widen to the point where people don't consider it appropriate for him to have such power.
His frequently-stated plan is to slowly divest himself of special powers on en:wp, basically because (a) Jimbo doesn't scale (b) there are other things for him to be getting on with. But the public-relations role of a royalty-style figurehead are in practice still very useful to us, and are part of the work under (b) (e.g. an obvious contact for BLP issues - although these are then handed to the same community members who answer info@wikimedia.org, hence stressing that emailing that address is every bit as effective).
That is, a British-style revolution, happening in a slow and orderly manner over a length of time. Although Charles I's reign ended somewhat abruptly, the changes in power since Charles II would be the sort of things that would happen in a revolution - the British royal family's job now being not the direct exercise of power, but mostly public relations and tourism, with the ear of the government of the day. I expect it will take Wikipedia less than 300 years to effect this, of course ;-)
- d.