I wrote:

...

Have Jimbo appoint a governing committee. This would inevitably be a non-representative subset of the entire community, but having Jimbo as our benevolent dictator is also non-representative.

And Ed Poor responded:

Sometimes Sheldon has good ideas, but this is not one of those times. He is otherwise a fine writer, and I've learned a lot from him.

Centralizing power won't help us make an open-content encyclopedia. In fact, the very reason Jimbo and Larry gave up Nupedia was that having a central committee guiding all productive activity simply doesn't work. (It didn't work in the USSR or any other Marxist socialist state, either: no incentive for individual excellence, and no sufficiently incorruptible way to coordinate activity)

Thanks for the kind words, Ed, but I think you've misunderstood my point. Right now power is ALREADY centralized. It's centralized in the hands of Jimbo, who almost always makes appropriate decisions but who simply doesn't have the time to adequately govern a community as large and contentious as Wikipedia has become. Establishing a committee would DECENTRALIZE power. I'm not proposing this as a "final solution" to the problem of governance for Wikipedia, merely as a transitional way of beginning the process of replacing Jimbo's benevolent-dictatorial rule with something more representative.

A good example of what I mean by "Jimbo's benevolent-dictatorial rule" was his recent handling of Plautus Satire. Jimbo didn't wait for the arbitration committee to do more than wring its hands; he simply reached a point of exasperation and said, "screw it, this guy's outta here." He did it unilaterally, and I applaud him for doing it. Nevertheless, he did it the way a dictator makes decisions: unilaterally, without any pretense that he was acting as a representative of the Wikipedia community. And this is perfectly understandable. In the absence of WikiDemocracy, Jimbo *has* to act as a dictator.

All I'm saying is that establishing a "committee" could be a useful first step toward establishing something more representative than we have at present. It would also remove some of the burden from Jimbo. I see no reason to expect that a "dictatorship by a benevolent committee" would be any worse than "dictatorship by a benevolent individual." And it wouldn't be "guiding all productive activity," except in the sense that Jimbo is ALREADY "guiding all productive activity" on the Wikipedia. Jimbo doesn't review and approve every article; he merely steps in when he sees a problem and fixes it. He also occasionally issues pronouncements on general policy. That's all we would want a governing committee to do. It shouldn't, wouldn't and couldn't dictate all activity on the Wikipedia. What I'm proposing is therefore quite different from the "Marxist socialist state" you describe.

The thing that has propelled Wikipedia to greatness and will forever sustain it, is the ability for "anyone, any time" to update it. All we need are some simple community norms and a transparent, agreed-upon method of enforcing these norms.

There's a contradiction in your language. On the one hand, you're saying that "anyone, any time" can update the Wikipedia. On the other hand, you're talking about "enforcing" community norms, and enforcement by definition means that some people are PREVENTED from participating. If enforcement exists, then it's not true that "anyone" can update the Wikipedia. The problem that keeps recurring with users like Bird is that they take the first promise at its word. Bird thinks he has a god-given, inherent right to post to the Wikipedia, because "anyone, any time" can do so. He interprets attempts to curb his vandalism as the use of "force to prevent free speech."

I think Wikipedia needs to bite the bullet and realize that we really DON'T want to allow "anyone, any time" to contribute. As Ed correctly observes, we need a method of enforcing community norms. This isn't an impossible task. The Internet is full of examples of discussion fora that are generally open to the public while still enforcing rules that keep out trolls and spammers.

--Sheldon Rampton