Neither they nor anyone else knows how to do this at our scale in as open a structure as ours. Most ideas tend to retreat towards one form or another of centralized control over content or to division of the project to reduce the scale. That it is possible to organize well enough to do what we've done on our scale, is proven by the result--an enormously useful product for the world in general. That we could do better is probable, since the current structure is almost entirely ad hoc, but there is no evidence as to what will work better. Intensely democratic structures have one characteristic form of repression of individuality, and controlled structures another. The virtue of division is to provide smaller structures adapted to different methods, so that individuals can find one that is tolerable, but this loses the key excitment of working together on something really large.
My own view is that we should treat this as an experiment, and pursue it on its own lines as far as it takes us.
On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax abd@lomaxdesign.com wrote:
if the structure were functional. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the founders of Wikipedia did not know how to put together a project that could maintain unity and consensus when the scale became large.