Anthere wrote:
About 3 years ago, I ranted a lot about the right of
minorities to say
their opinion and have it respected and taken into account.
We are a diverse project, and we should preserve this diversity by
being respectful of local habits.
Taking decision by majority vote, and imposing local communities the
wish of the global community is acceptable only when it does harm the
project not to all walk in the same direction with the same pace.
This is the essence of maintaining vitality in our separate
communities. The policies that really matter are and should remain very
few, and should be what define what is at the very heart of the project
family.
You may answer notafish with giving her the "big
rules", "big
policies", "big guidelines" and other "big things" which were
voted
on. This does not hide the fact wikinews is not welcome among us. Just
as wikiquotes, it will be a project in survival. I will not either
mention how many french people work on wikisource or wikispecies.
Wiktionary and wikibooks are below 50 edits per day as well. People
are doing great things on them, but even after 2 years, these projects
are still hardly resources. They will be great things later, but right
now, they still host small communities.
As a person whose activities are focused on Wikisource and
en:Wiktionary, I very much agree. Surely I would like these projects to
be broadly useful resources, but they can only become so by developing
their own policies, and by finding their own forms of consensus. These
may be very different from what is agreed on other projects, notably the
en:Wikipedia. I can't say much about Wikinews, because I'm simply not
interested in what happens there, and not particularly enthusiastic
about it either.
One of the very poor aspects of globalization is
forcing communities
in a direction they are not ready to assume. It is forcing communities
to assume a standard of life which they can not handle. It is pushing
them to grow to fast, to run after more modern and developped ones.
The depth of this perspective goes far beyond our wiki family.
Globalization seems to be driven by a drive toward efficiency. The
Corporation is helped in maximizing its profits by maximizing the
efficiency of its operations. A mindset develops from that among the
people who manage such systems, to the point that they often lose sight
of why a project was undertaken in the first place. Whe do _we_ need
efficiency?
A project governed by rules and policies before being
governed by what
people wish is not what I wish for us.
In my perspective, it is a huge disappointment. Huge because what wins
here is not what a community really wishes, it is a set of rules,
policies and such, drafted by a couple of people. It is not consensus,
it is the rule of the strongest. And local community wish crushed by
globalization.
Certainly. A totally new project will surely look towards other
projects for guidelines. It can examine those projects to see both what
goes wrong and what goes right. An early leader of a project will draw
upon these for a first set of rules that will be needed just to make the
project operational. If he chooses those rules well they will be
accepted by the community without much argument. Ultimately, in these
projects the rules will be drafted by a couple people; there's no
escaping that because drafting rules involves a certain kind of language
use. But who does the drafting should not be important as long as the
person is able to do that in a way that is sensitive to the feelings of
the community.
Ec