[Foundation-l] Case Study: Fan History's Proposal For Being Acquired by the WMF

[Tim Starling]

Tomasz Ganicz wrote:
> 2009/12/20 Laura Hale <laura at fanhistory.com>:
>> This was posted to the Strategy wiki but I don't think I ever mentioned it
>> on list.  The case study itself can be found at
>> http://www.fanhistory.com/FHproposal.pdf .  The blog entry about the case
>> study can be found at http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1103 .
>>
> 
> I think the study shows the old problems, which mainly comes from
> Wikimedia/Wikipedia history.
> 
> Meta wiki was first created as a place for meta-cross-project
> discussions including strategy planning as well. Then there was an
> assumption (IMHO false) that there is some sort of
> meta-cross-language-cross-projects-community which is allowed to make
> vital decisions by the system of consensus process mixed with voting
> system.It was soon found silly and many decisions were moved to
> Wikimedia committees that theoretically were created just as
> "advisory bodies" for Wikimedia Board of Trustees, but in fact the
> advice given by the committees was usually accepted by the Board. 

Note that Meta was founded in 2001, so it significantly predates the
Foundation and the non-Wikipedia projects. So the idea that
decision-making there was "soon found silly" is a bit of an
exaggeration. It predates the namespace feature in MediaWiki; it
originally had a role similar to the Help and Wikipedia namespaces on
the English Wikipedia today.

-- Tim Starling