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