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

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

> 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.
>

Or even worse, when it comes to voting users who are not really regular
meta participants but who are interested in accepting or rejecting the
proposal arrive in big numbers and then the coordination decides, not
really any reasonable arguments.

Cheers
Yaroslav