Tomasz Ganicz wrote:
2009/12/20 Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com:
This was posted to the Strategy wiki but I don't think I ever mentioned it on list. The case study itself can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/FHproposal.pdf . The blog entry about the case study can be found at http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1103 .
I think the study shows the old problems, which mainly comes from Wikimedia/Wikipedia history.
Meta wiki was first created as a place for meta-cross-project discussions including strategy planning as well. Then there was an assumption (IMHO false) that there is some sort of meta-cross-language-cross-projects-community which is allowed to make vital decisions by the system of consensus process mixed with voting system.It was soon found silly and many decisions were moved to Wikimedia committees that theoretically were created just as "advisory bodies" for Wikimedia Board of Trustees, but in fact the advice given by the committees was usually accepted by the Board.
Note that Meta was founded in 2001, so it significantly predates the Foundation and the non-Wikipedia projects. So the idea that decision-making there was "soon found silly" is a bit of an exaggeration. It predates the namespace feature in MediaWiki; it originally had a role similar to the Help and Wikipedia namespaces on the English Wikipedia today.
-- Tim Starling