[Foundation-l] How not to manage opensource project

[Delirium]

Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

>Anthere wrote:
>
>  
>
>>As far as I (as a board member) is concerned, I consider the Foundation 
>>to be there to "support" the projects. Absolutely not to govern them.
>>By support, I mean "provide infrastructure", "provide legal frame", help 
>>set up collaborations to collect/create content, help distribution of 
>>the content created. Not govern. Not manage.
>>    
>>
>
>What you mention here are of course the most important tasks of the 
>foundation. However, my position is a bit different to yours. IMO the 
>foundation has also the duty to step in as an emergency government in 
>case the self government of a projects doesn't work. But this should 
>always be a temporary measure and restricted to single actions.
>
>I'm thinking here for example of cases like the quran quote in the site 
>notice of the urdu wikipedia. If the community in a wiki acts against 
>the core principles of Wikimedia, for example violates the neutrality, 
>it needs someone external to set it right. Of course this is something 
>which could also be done by the international community except that this 
>is not a body with any authority but a bunch of loosely connected 
>individuals with diverse opinions.
>  
>
That sounds reasonable to me.  In some respects this can be viewed more 
as "facilitating" than really "governing".  I think it's clear that if 
every Wikipedian could speak Urdu and was active at that Wikipedia, the 
dispute you mention would never have happened in the first place---the 
Wikipedian community as a whole wouldn't be in favor of putting such a 
quote up.  However most Wikipedians can speak only a small subset of the 
total languages in the world, so there has to be some active 
facilitation to ensure that all the different languages' projects are at 
least in broad outlines following the goals of the project.

In some languages, like en:, the facilitation needed is minimal---lots 
and lots of people speak enough English to at least be able to tell 
what's going on and express their opinion if they think it's going 
wrongly.  So not only Americans and Britons, but also Germans, Japanese, 
Chinese, Indians, etc. can all directly express their opinion about what 
en: should be like, and it's basically impossible for some small group 
of people to take it in a direction everyone else disagrees in without 
someone noticing and pointing it out.  Preventing that from happening on 
smaller Wikipedias in lesser-spoken languages requires some more active 
oversight, though.

-Mark