I basically agree that the big communities are now too big to take major course changing community decisions. I do not follow so closely what is going on in en.wp, however, the never-ending-story of flagged revisions could be a good example. Another never-ending-story on Global arbcom / Wikicouncil / whatever level it got stuck now is another one. I remember still how in the middle of tough but slowly progressing discussion on global admins on Meta within a day several hundred en.wp users apparently unhappy with the fact that somebody may be rolling back their edits came, voted no, and the proposal was dead. Most of them never participated in the discussion and have never been seen on meta.
Having said that, I must add that I am pessimistic. I believe that the Board / Foundation will not take any steps until it is obvious to everybody that there major problems (for instance, a major fork or smth). This is the reason I think Amir's proposal does not have a chance. It may be still implemented on smaller wikis (say below 500K articles) since the communities may decide to implement it, but currently not on the biggest projects.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:02:54 -0500, Stephanie Daugherty sdaugherty@gmail.com wrote:
I personally am not convinced here that we at at the point yet where we have this level of community brokenness, but we are getting very close if we aren't there already. The consensus process used at the individual
project
level oftentimes breaks down entirely on very contentious issues with as little as a dozen participants in a discussion. Governance by consensus
is
an important part of our heritage and future, but as currently
implemented,
it holds us a prisoner of our own inertia in some key areas.
This is a major threat to the future of several large WMF projects, and
one
that has been getting some media attention, particularly by naysayers. I honestly don't think these issues alone can cause us to fail, but I do believe that if ignored long enough, they will create a set of
conditions
that will allow it to happen. Once conditions become intolerable to the most dedicated members of a community, the possibility of a "mainstream" fork
-
a fork that takes the bulk of the community with it - begins to become a viable prospect.
The fallout, obviously, would be enormous. There are a few readily
apparent
ways that I see that we can reach such a point.
- The projects become ungovernable, and the resulting chaos results
in a
political (in a wikipolitics sense) fork in order to establish a more viable structure. (Likely, and to some degree in motion already)
- The foundation itself goes rogue, and tries to impose conditions
unacceptable to it's member communities. (Unlikely, but not inconceivable.)
- The foundation proves too unresponsive for the technical needs of
the
communities it serves. (Likely, already happening to some degree.)
- The foundation becomes insolvent. (Possible at some point if
fundraising efforts fail.)
Our communities and the foundation itself need to look at these as
serious
"threats from within" to our mission, and decide accordingly how we will deal with them. If we ignore them, and keep our head in the sand, one or more of them may eventually happen, and the outcome won't be pretty.
-Steph _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l