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

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2009/12/20 Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>:
> 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.
>

Well, My "story" is quite obviously just a simplification of the long
history. For me the first contact with meta was in 2002 and it was
about some sort of strategy planning - the discussion of the "second
stage of Wikipedia" - i.e. the idea of cleaning-up the Wikipedia as it
become large enough to be called a real encyclopedia :-) (roughly 100
000 articles). The second contact was at 2003 when we were voting for
"ambassador" of Polish Wikipedia. Anyway - what is my main point is
that the consensus/voting system in meta - was based on an idea that
there is a kind of meta-community, a large group of people interested
to look at Wikimedia movement as a whole, which has their origins in
various Wikimedia project's communities, not only English Wikipedia
and not only Wikipedias. In fact, it was always 90%+ English Wikipedia
community + 9%+ major other languages Wikipedia's communities members
+ less than 1% of minor languages Wikipedia's and other Wikimedia
project's communities. Therefore that system never worked effectively
- as there was never such a real meta-community which could
effectively represent the general Wikimedia projects' editors
community of communities.

-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html