[Foundation-l] VC - alternative resolution

[Ray Saintonge]

Milos Rancic wrote:
> There are a lot of important issues which may be decided only by a
> legitimate entity of the global community. During the last years the
> Board was not willing to make any community-related issue until things
> became too critical. We needed months (or more than a year?) to close
> Siberian Wikipedia, (at least) a month or two was needed to regulate
> things on Russian Wikibooks, years were passed and I don't see
> resolution of the problems around Moldovan Wikipedia... How much time
> was passed from technical availability of SUL until the start of its
> implementation? Who is responsible for the fact that we don't have a
> possibility to resolve anything outside of a particular community? Who
> is responsible for the fact that I am not able to compile one wikibook
> on Serbian Wikibooks from translations from German and English
> Wikibooks? Who is responsible for NPOV development? Who is responsible
> for taking care about encyclopedic and NPOV principles on Wikipedias?
>   
We're getting ahead of ourselves with some of this.  Respect for the 
autonomy of the projects needs to be an operating principle for a 
Council.  Projects should not be given the impression that the Council 
is there to make their tough decisions for them.  Whether Serbian 
Wikibooks allows translations is entirely its own decision; nobody there 
should expect the Council to rescue it from a bad decision on something 
like that.

I support Council's role in the development of broad NPOV standards, but 
it would still be up to the projects to interpret those standards in 
relation to their own circumstances.  For Wikisource the NPOV issue is 
never the overheated problem found on Wikipedia.

An argument can certainly be made to have the language committee fall 
within Council hierarchy,  but that should not become a mandate for 
Council to micromanage the activities of the language committee.Perhaps 
it will be enough to reserve a Council seat for the language committee.
> The answer is simple: no one is responsible. There is no any person or
> body which took responsibility over such issues. Board is taking care
> only if something threats to go out of control at the wider scale. All
> other things are up to the strength of the local communities.
>   
Why should that change under a Council.  Perhaps the Council should be 
the one develop policies for dealing with dysfunctional projects, but 
that too will require a clear understanding of what we mean by 
"dysfunctional", and an ability to show restraint when a community's 
problems do not meet that definition.
> But, out of those well known problems, there are *a lot* of very small
> and simple problems which roots are in a lack of communication between
> the communities. A couple of days ago I sent to two lists (+ one more
> resent by David Gerard) about cooperation between professors, experts
> and students around Wikimedia. And I realized that I found one more
> already partially realized idea which would require a lot of work and
> coordination to become functional. And, again, I don't see the right
> place to talk about the organization of such thing. ... How many times
> Wikimedians would make a similar template or the same not so easy to
> make bot for some purpose? ... Who is responsible to ask people from
> one small project what do they need? ...
>   
It's hard to visualize what kind of miracles you are expecting here.  
Maybe this comes into the purview of the communications committee; I 
can't be sure of that.  My approach to the communications committee is 
likely to be similar to the way I would approach the language committee.
> If all of those issues are not enough big for making a communication
> and decision-making channel for all projects, I am really not sure do
> Wikimedian projects have anything else common except hosting their
> content at WMF servers.
What the projects have in common may be just one more thing that the 
Council needs to figure out.  Still it's not up to Council to tell them 
what they have in common.

Ec