[Foundation-l] Board officers elected; Anthere is Chair!

[David Gerard]

On 01/11/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 11/1/06, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:

> > It's like how you have some sort of de facto leadership over Wikinews, right
> > Erik?

> Not quite. I've never claimed or used any special authority on WN (or
> en.wn specifically, which is the only one where I could remotely get
> away with it), and I would have been whacked from above and below if I
> had. ;-)


The history as I understand it, please correct as needed:

en:wp was the first Wikipedia and is by far the largest and most
problematic. (I find it a perenially fascinating problem to get press
to realise Wikimedia does anything else, or even that there is a
Wikipedia in their own language.) As founder, Jimbo had and has a role
as the person ultimately empowered to say "um, no, you're being a
dick; stop it." He really hates using this power and is very unsure of
how to, so doesn't a whole lot.

In late 2003/early 2004, Jimbo and James Forrester set up the
Arbitration Committee to solve the problem that Jimbo doesn't scale.
So twelve or so foolish volunteers have the job of bouncer, and throw
out really sorely problematic patrons of en:wp. (Though in the last
year or so, the admins have gotten reasonably skilled at discerning
the utterly impossible and kicking them out by popular acclaim - a
"community ban", on the principle that if you can't get *one* of the
1000+ en:wp admins to unban you, you just might be hopelessly at odds
with the way en:wp works.)

Jimbo's power is to be the Constitutional Monarch, but his power works
as far as and as long as the community - the volunteers who do
everything, after all - consider it does. So far the arrangement works
pretty well. IMO it produces better results than a pure community
approach does, because that results in utter jawdropping idiocy like
RFCs against people for deleting copyright-violating userboxes without
proper community consultation (whatever that is when they're breaking
the law).


- d.