I don't think we should use voting. Individuals should take responsibility and simply carry out the proper action. If the wishes or ideas of others should be taken into account, the responsible person should find an ad hoc way of considering them.
But no formal system of voting is immune to subversion by determined anti-social forces, so I think we should stick with "benevolent dictatorship" with Jimbo as wiki-Messiah and all of us "heavenly citizens" as his loyal subjects.
If Mav, Eric, KQ, et al., make a decision, I trust it!
"Uncle Ed" Poor
P.S. I didn't list all the names, but the people whom I trust know who they are ^_^)
Well, I don't think we'll make changes anytime soon.
Benevolent dictatorship has worked well so far because people mostly like me and trust me, or at least my wikipedia persona ;-). I'm kind and I listen and I try to make lots of people happy.
But that's a pretty vague foundation to project into the future.
1. What if I do something really obnoxious? Not good.
2. What about controversies in languages that I don't understand? It's hard for me to figure it all out.
3. With a relatively small group, figuring out consensus policies and recognizing that my actions do, in fact, reflect consensus, is not especially problematic. But as we grow, situations will likely arise where it's more difficult to say that.
4. And finally, there is a class of decisions that weighs heavily on me, namely decisions about banning. My pleasant demeanor may not reveal how much I agonize over these, in *both* directions. Some mornings I wake up in a mood to ban everyone. Other mornings I wake up in a mood that says that everyone can be saved. So I have to think and worry a lot about these. Despite the difficulty, though, I like doing it well enough for now. But someday I might be exhausted by it, and might prefer a more broad-based procedure.
--Jimbo
Well, I don't think we'll make changes anytime soon.
Jimbo,
we all trust you to do the right thing. It's not very scalable and a bit slow, but it should suffice for a while, especially when we at least organize the discussion process better. I do believe that your role will increasingly expose you to criticism and flames, especially as Larry is no longer there to play primary target.
However, as you said yourself, the system doesn't work well for the non-English Wikipedias *right now*. What should we do to decide in these conflicts?
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
However, as you said yourself, the system doesn't work well for the non-English Wikipedias *right now*. What should we do to decide in these conflicts?
I honestly don't know.
One reason consensus works reasonably well here is that we can listen to different people's proposals and the _nuances_ of their language. There's a rich web of information communicated in our ongoing discussions, more rich than any simple set of voting alternatives ever could be.
Everyone knows that there are certain shared values that we express through our homegrown slogans (Wiki is not paper, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, etc.).
I can plea for translations of what is going on, but that has proven to be not very successful.
If something happened in de.wikipedia, as an example, I could simply listen to a few people who I know well enough, who speak German, and advise them on things, but pretty much leave the tough decisions to them, backed up by my "official" stamp. There's you (a German speaker, right?) and Magnus and probably some others.
In other languages, though, I get long private emails from people who don't speak English well, accusing each other of various WikiWarCrimes, and it's just damned difficult to figure it all out.
--Jimbo
But no formal system of voting is immune to subversion by determined anti-social forces, so I think we should stick with "benevolent dictatorship" with Jimbo as wiki-Messiah and all of us "heavenly citizens" as his loyal subjects.
If Mav, Eric, KQ, et al., make a decision, I trust it!
"Uncle Ed" Poor
So...something like... "voting" to "elect" people "we" trust... to take decisions for us ???
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