Ray Saintonge wrote:
I am not personally involved in Wikibooks, so I'm not about to push my policy views there, but I would be inclined to exclude such material on the basis that it does more harm than good. At the same time I believe in the importance of the community to Wikis. A community leader (and Robert's regular comments in this mailing list suggest that he is such a leader in Wikibooks) needs to exercise skills at building consensus, and also needs to be able to override community opinion when he feels that there is an important enough matter of principle at stake. When he does that he needs to face the inevitable flak.
Calling on Jimbo to decide on something is a cop-out. It's a sad admission that the community isn't strong enough to settle its own problems. It is strategically unsound for a general to micromanage local battles.
It is strategically unsound to design and implement a political machine around micromanagement and then refuse to manage. Unless of course one's strategy is to divert web traffic elsewhere.
Rather than implying Roberth is an ineffectual leader after placing any emergent leadership in an ineffectual position subject to Jimmy says grams; perhaps you should call on Jimbo to go assist the Wikibooks community in their discussions regarding how editorial policy might be established, maintained and how an effective board capable of enforcing that policy with community support might be initiated.
The statement "Calling on Jimbo to decide on something is a cop-out." is as intellectually dishonest statement as I have personally witnessed on the internet given the fact that you or someone signing as you has been present while Wikipedia and Wikimedia evolved through the owner, founder, "Jimbo says ...", god king, stacked board sequence to its current state.
The fact is that the sole established factor deciding editorial policy in all Wikimedia projects is Jimmy's opinion regarding the "NPOV" policy which he mandates and which reduces in the case of controversy to his opinion or the opinion of his hand picked delegates and probably his legal liability as a publisher as per his lawyer's opinions regarding Florida and U.S. federal law which are not always made public to the "community".
How exactly would you propose that Roberth or any other emergent leadership "override community opinion" when an important prinicple is at stake? In the final analysis the Wikimedia Foundation controls the hard drives and servers and it is controlled by expressed intent and design by one person. The only way to override or implement "community opinion" is to be in concurrence with "Jimmy says ...."
I suggest if the Wikimedia Foundation is serious in its pitch for cash http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising it should be giving some serious thought to an authentic editorial policy and a board actually deriving legitimacy from its "community" of diverse stakeholders rather than a single founder and his personal financial interests and philisophical opinions or fallacies.
Once that overall policy has been articulated and ratified by stakeholders in a form that does not require a final judgement from the godking, or the stacked Board, or their selected trusted minions every two controversial kilobytes then perhaps you can chide "community leaders" for the failure of their "communities" to establish and manage their own policies consistent with the mandates of the Wikimedia Foundation in exchange for bandwidth, servers, and administrative support.
regards, lazyquasar