On 3/30/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Back then the project was merely two years old. We could afford to be less picky about admins back then. Some people have gone over the top in their requirements, but how can we address that without affecting the fact the entire community has a voice in the process?
1. I'd say we can afford to be less picky about admins now. 2. The community SHOULD have a voice in the process, but that's not exactly what's happening.
It's a similar issue to AFD... a certain group gets established around a section of Wikipedia, and develops rules, procedure, and norms based on the attitude of that group, which may be very different from those of the rest of the community. Then, the tasks (important to the functioning of Wikipedia) that're entrusted to them start being handled in ways that are not in Wikipedia's best interest.
(Sidenote: While Jimbo and others assert that BLP issues are our biggest PR issue (and while I can understand completely why they'd think so), in my experience, AFD has done far more damage, and has made enemies out of a lot of people who wanted to help us.)
I don't know the answer to this... it's similar to some "committee as fiefdom" tendencies I've seen in some organizations IRL. Those cases varied depending on the nature of the organization and the choices they made... essentially, they either dealt with it or were crippled by it.
Generally speaking, the ones that successfully resolved it were ones that 1) recognized the problem as something that needed to be fixed, in an active sense, and 2) empowered someone (typically their officers, but in some groups of an anti-hierarchical bent, an individual or group specially elected for this role) to specifically "deal with it", and agreed to support those thus empowered in implementing whatever remedies they suggested.
When I say "crippled by it", I mean that the organization got bogged down in internal issues, and ceased making outwardly appreciable progress towards their goal. Sometimes they didn't fix it, and lost members and momentum to a more active group... other times they recovered after a change of leadership.
Just my experience...
-- Jake Nelson [[en:User:Jake Nelson]]