Well, My "story" is quite obviously just a
simplification of the long
history. For me the first contact with meta was in 2002 and it was
about some sort of strategy planning - the discussion of the "second
stage of Wikipedia" - i.e. the idea of cleaning-up the Wikipedia as it
become large enough to be called a real encyclopedia :-) (roughly 100
000 articles). The second contact was at 2003 when we were voting for
"ambassador" of Polish Wikipedia. Anyway - what is my main point is
that the consensus/voting system in meta - was based on an idea that
there is a kind of meta-community, a large group of people interested
to look at Wikimedia movement as a whole, which has their origins in
various Wikimedia project's communities, not only English Wikipedia
and not only Wikipedias. In fact, it was always 90%+ English Wikipedia
community + 9%+ major other languages Wikipedia's communities members
+ less than 1% of minor languages Wikipedia's and other Wikimedia
project's communities. Therefore that system never worked effectively
- as there was never such a real meta-community which could
effectively represent the general Wikimedia projects' editors
community of communities.
Or even worse, when it comes to voting users who are not really regular
meta participants but who are interested in accepting or rejecting the
proposal arrive in big numbers and then the coordination decides, not
really any reasonable arguments.
Cheers
Yaroslav