Gerard Meijssen wrote:
As the discussions about all these plans is going to be in English, it will be very much "others" telling communities how to behave, how to move forward. The notion that policies and guidelines are good is offset by people who found themselves not or no longer welcome and moved away. As this is already true for English language projects, you may appreciate that the notion that "the" rules and guidelines are beneficial is just wrong when you try to project them on other projects.
That's why the most broadly applicable rules need to be very few and to be very broadly flexible. Anglo-cultural dominance is far more insidious than anglophonic dominance.
When you want to transcend local policies and guidelines, you have to start thinking on a more global level. On this level there are big and small Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, Wikibooks etc. There are projects that serve a global need and are the victim of local constraints like Commons and also Meta. We are not organised in a way that gives priority to the more global issues and consequently we are very much unaware of issues that the "others" face and why our "local" issues can be irrelevant elsewhere. Given this lack of awareness there are few low hanging fruits because we forgot to bring the bees to the orchard.
When the hive mind becomes too crowded the bees set off to found new colonies. Maybe we should be encouraging more forks.
Ec