Just because a body is large does not mean that decisions will be bad. Are you saying that the community is too stupid to govern itself?
----- Original Message ---- From: Jesse Plamondon-Willard pathoschild@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2008 10:07:35 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Community Assembly
Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com wrote: If it would make you happier, the consensus provision can be changed to a 60% majority.
We can rarely achieve a 60% majority consensus for most issues on this list, and its membership is smaller than that of an all-inclusive assembly. Depending on voting also makes numerical superiority more important than meaningful debate, so that a cultural or special-interest minority (likely including en-Wikipedia) would dominate the community through the assembly using numerical superiority. Reaching many bad decisions due to poor representation is worse than reaching few good decisions.
Hoi, Given that there are some 700 communities to start with, I do not think that there is much awareness of the community that is the whole of all our communities. When you add to this the issue with communication, these 700 projects represent over 250 languages, I think I am polite when I suggest that there is a lot of communal intelligence to be developped. Thanks, GerardM
On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 6:30 PM, Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com wrote:
Just because a body is large does not mean that decisions will be bad. Are you saying that the community is too stupid to govern itself?
----- Original Message ---- From: Jesse Plamondon-Willard pathoschild@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2008 10:07:35 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Community Assembly
Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com wrote: If it would make you happier, the consensus provision can be changed to a 60% majority.
We can rarely achieve a 60% majority consensus for most issues on this list, and its membership is smaller than that of an all-inclusive assembly. Depending on voting also makes numerical superiority more important than meaningful debate, so that a cultural or special-interest minority (likely including en-Wikipedia) would dominate the community through the assembly using numerical superiority. Reaching many bad decisions due to poor representation is worse than reaching few good decisions.
-- Yours cordially, Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
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Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com wrote:
Just because a body is large does not mean that decisions will be bad. Are you saying that the community is too stupid to govern itself?
No, the "Community" you refer to is actually a collection of diverse communities. The English Wikipedia operates very differently from the way the English Wikisource operates, and they're not even different cultures. I imagine both operate very differently from the way the Urdu Wikipedia operates.
When you say the "Community" will make decisions by simple majority approval vote, you mean that all issues will be decided by a numerical superiority. This means the English Wikipedia, and the other major languages, will become the de facto leaders and policymakers for all wikis, regardless of those wikis' own preferences.
Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
Just because a body is large does not mean that decisions will be bad.
You are ignoring the importance of random processes.
Are you saying that the community is too stupid to govern itself?
When a community is full of prima donnas it may be inevitable that the sum of these individual stupidities is greater than the whole. :-)
Ec
2008/5/12 Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com:
Just because a body is large does not mean that decisions will be bad. Are you saying that the community is too stupid to govern itself?
The problem is that mass devolved consensus-based governance sort of fails to work except in the simplest of circumstances. This isn't because we're collectively stupid, or individually inherently evil, or all unscrupulously trying to get the upper hand; it's because we're human beings. I don't see that changing, whatever committee exists. Consensus is *hard*.
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