Jesse Plamondon-Willard wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
If a proposed amendment fails to meet
community approval criteria it fails, and that's the end of it. It is
not the mandate of a subcommittee to override that. I am well aware of
the problem of inadequate community participation, but community silence
does not mean consent, and without a predetermined minimum level of
community participation no policy or policy amendment should be
considered as approved.
That is incorrect. The language subcommittee was specifically tasked
with formulating and implementing a language subdomain creation
policy. The committee furthermore did not override the community. Some
community members questioned the need for that clause (long after it
was introduced), and failed to achieve any consensus whatsoever on
whether to keep, change, or remove it. As such, no change was made.
Whether committees *should* make decisions or depend on the wider
community to do so is a very different discussion than whether they
*can*.
I can't speak in terms of the factual specifics for the language policy
because I did not follow it as it was developing. I don't see it as
appropriate that a committee would make policies simply because it can.
That's an attitude that distances the committee from the community.
"Override" is probably a stronger word than what I would use in the
circumstances, when the result was based on an absence of consensus.
What really needs to be clarified with respect to any committee is a
demarcation of the committee's job in relation to the community's rights
to decide.
As an aside, I'm a little confused. You say that
committees should not
make or change policies, but you are a member of the Provisional
Volunteer Council. Do you intend the PVC to simply be a proposal mill,
throwing out ideas for the community to debate?
That's an important question. In general I would say more yes than no,
but it's still an important point that needs to be hammered out by all
the PVC. With the number of active projects in Wikimedia the Council
cannot presume to dictate what each of these projects will do. If it
does that it will soon lose credibility and influence among the
communities. Policies need to go back and forth between committee and
community until there is is agreement. The same also applies to any
amendment of existing policy. Naturally there need to be criteria for
what constitutes community agreement.
Ec