On 14/03/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)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(a)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.