2009/12/20 Laura Hale <laura(a)fanhistory.com>om>: I think the study shows the old problems, which mainly comes from Wikimedia/Wikipedia history. Meta wiki was first created as a place for meta-cross-project discussions including strategy planning as well. Then there was an assumption (IMHO false) that there is some sort of meta-cross-language-cross-projects-community which is allowed to make vital decisions by the system of consensus process mixed with voting system.It was soon found silly and many decisions were moved to Wikimedia committees that theoretically were created just as "advisory bodies" for Wikimedia Board of Trustees, but in fact the advice given by the committees was usually accepted by the Board. Than - when the process of increase of power and size of Foundation's office started many vital decisions were transferred to the office from the Board of Trustees, which only is expected to lead the general Wikimedia Foundation direction and do not interfere with everyday single issue decision making process. Therefore we have now a kind of power structure which looks like a square. On one corner (the most powerful a the moment IMHO) - we have an Office with paid staff, on the other we have a Board of Trustees, on the third there are a set of existing committees, and on the fourth there is use to be meta-cross-language-cross-projects-community and no one knows who really have a decision power in this or another issue, so if potentially difficult decision is about to be made all corners of the square are just playing some sort of table tennis just hitting a ball with rackets back and forth to each other on a table untill the ball is broken or end up forgotten in the net or on the floor :-) -- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html

2009/12/20 Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: 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. -- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html