Jimmy Wales wrote:
Recently I heard about a big argument in the German Wikipedia about the Verein... and honestly it sounded to me like the same story all over again. People who are very good volunteers but who prefer, for good reasons, to spend their time editing, may not always properly appreciate the work of other volunteers who become more involved in organizational work.
Part of the problem from my perspective is that it feels like you need to make the transition to meta-level time committment to have any say in how things are run. But even keeping up with the public mailing lists is a significant time commitment---I'm the most "meta-involved" by far of the Wikipedians I know in real life, and I'm only moderately involved compared to many folks. I don't think that people who prefer to spend most of their time editing the encyclopedia, developing its policies, resolving article, disputes, etc.---the people intimately familiar with the workings of our main reason for being here---should be cut off from knowledge of and a say in what's going on at "higher levels". Important issues should be announced ahead of time to the community at large; comments should be solicited and taken into account before final decisions are made; and in very important cases even referendum-type votes (or at least straw polls) should be taken.
At the very least things should be routinely discussed on the publicly-accessible mailing lists, and ideally important things should be announced on the relevant wikis (i.e. Village-Pump type places) early enough to give non-mailing-list folk a chance to weigh in.
In short: Most people have neither the time nor inclination to get involved in meta-level activities that require a time committment. This is particularly true of some of the types of people I think we'd like to have more of, like professors. So if the Foundation is to represent a movement that includes those people, they need to continually be kept in the loop and repeatedly brought back into the debate. A professor who edits Wikipedia in his spare time is probably not going to also read a dozen mailing lists, show up to IRC meetings, and volunteer to serve on committees, but could still be kept in the loop.
-Mark