On 12/13/06, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
David,
I read it. A crowd can never come to a decision about anything; they can only make enough noise to call attention to the fact that a decision needs to be made. At some point, very early in its history, there was no Wikipedia crowd. How, and by whom, were the decisions made that evolved into what Wikipedia is now?
Essentially there's always been a Wikipedia crowd; by that I mean decisions have never been terribly top-down. Larry Sanger was the master herder of the early decision-making.
http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia unfortunately lacks a full history (a good project for the Foundation to tackle) but you can see a relatively well-formed set of early policies.
See also http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_commentary
In November Sanger started segregating policy suggestions he liked from those he didn't to create meta.wikipedia.com (well, it's more complicated than that, but that was part of the impetus).
This is also a good early page: http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/Our_Replies_to_Our_Critics
Click around and learn more.
Marc
From: "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 18:56:09 +0000 To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)
On 13/12/06, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
I am not suggesting that a "small committee" (your term) fix the
problems of
Wikipedia - just one small part of it. And, if flexibility leads to
chaos
then it does more harm than good - and is ultimately destructive.
The trouble is that this trick never works. See [[WP:PRO]] for an
explanation.
- d.
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