Split permissions have been a perennial issue for en.wikipedia for a while.
It's proposed every couple months, has vocal support and a handful of even
more vocal opponents, and fillibustered into oblivion to resurface a few
months later. Rinse, lather, repeat. The only partial success was with
rollback, which actually got broken into it's own permission, but it hasn't
happened elsewhere.
Same cycle any time you try to reform a particularly contentious area on a
large WMF project. You get cries of "it's not broken" "That's
stupid" that
drown out any attempt to analyse the issue or progress meaningfully towards
improvements.
-Steph
On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 7:32 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Stephanie Daugherty
<sdaugherty(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 5:48 PM, masti
<mastigm(a)gmail.com> wrote:
why should tht be decided on foundation level? Do
you think communities
are so broken that they cannot make their own decisions?
This would be the only reason to start discussing enforcement of such
major changes
I personally am not convinced here that we at at the point yet where we
have
this level of community brokenness, but we are
getting very close if we
aren't there already. The consensus process used at the individual
project
level oftentimes breaks down entirely on very
contentious issues with as
little as a dozen participants in a discussion. Governance by consensus
is
an important part of our heritage and future, but
as currently
implemented,
it holds us a prisoner of our own inertia in some
key areas.
This is a major threat to the future of several large WMF projects, and
one
that has been getting some media attention,
particularly by naysayers. I
honestly don't think these issues alone can cause us to fail, but I do
believe that if ignored long enough, they will create a set of conditions
that will allow it to happen. Once conditions become intolerable to the
most
dedicated members of a community, the possibility
of a "mainstream" fork
- a
fork that takes the bulk of the community with it
- begins to become a
viable prospect.
The fallout, obviously, would be enormous. There are a few readily
apparent
ways that I see that we can reach such a point.
- The projects become ungovernable, and the resulting chaos results in
a
political (in a wikipolitics sense) fork in
order to establish a more
viable
structure. (Likely, and to some degree in
motion already)
- The foundation itself goes rogue, and tries to impose conditions
unacceptable to it's member communities. (Unlikely, but not
inconceivable.)
- The foundation proves too unresponsive for
the technical needs of the
communities it serves. (Likely, already happening to some degree.)
- The foundation becomes insolvent. (Possible at some point if
fundraising efforts fail.)
Our communities and the foundation itself need to look at these as
serious
"threats from within" to our mission,
and decide accordingly how we will
deal with them. If we ignore them, and keep our head in the sand, one or
more of them may eventually happen, and the outcome won't be pretty.
-Steph
Question -
When was the last time something like this was proposed on
en.wikipedia, or on wikien-l?
I agree that there are some things which have been very difficult to
get or move consensus on, but I don't know that there would
necessarily be enough opposition to prevent successful implementation
of a split permissions level approach on en.wp right now.
I don't recall a prior proposal but I don't pretend to be able to
follow all the policy threads going on across the many sites and lists
and umpteen pages successfully.
If one was floated and failed, a pointer is fine, and we can go from there.
If one hasn't been floated - why not take this opportunity and do so,
and see what happens?
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com
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