Part of the reason to keep it as it is:
A) It happens so rarely, a committee is hardly called for, and B) The Board needs to be involved anyway.
Thus, community debate followed by Board approval is the best method. It's worked thus far, and I would say it can continue to work.
-Chad
On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/14 Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com:
As I pointed out on Wikipedia Weekly earlier this week (Ep. 49 hasn't come out yet), the Board /must/ be involved in the creation of new projects (note: this is new *projects*, not new *languages*). [...]
More to the point, it'd be overkill to do it any other way
We create new projects very rarely - let's look at the past list.
2001 - Wikipedia 2002 - Wiktionary 2003 - Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource 2004 - *Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews 2005 - [nothing] 2006 - Wikiversity 2007 - [nothing] 2008 - [nothing so far]
That's a total of nine projects (omitting incubator and meta, as not really standalone projects) - and of those nine, only *one* was founded in the last three and a half years.
Because we draw the definitions of our projects so widely, it is generally fairly unlikely that a lot more will come along that we want to do, and which we can't subsume into an existing project - it's unlikely we'll create a Wikirecipies or a Wikilaw or what have you - and so whilst I certainly don't rule out there being more, I don't imagine we'll see many of them.
Why develop a lot of policy, a lot of structure and committees and so on, for something that's likely to only be meaningful once every five years or so? We can handle it by the traditional methods - a bunch of enthusiasts get together, make a case, get more people, take it to the Board - if and when it becomes necessary.
It may not be efficient or ideologically tidy, but it certainly beats wasting our time creating a committee that never does anything :-)
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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