[Foundation-l] Simple English Encyclopedia

[Anthony]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 7:16 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> The discussion has to
> take place somewhere, meta seems the best option (the only obvious
> alternative is to have closure discussions on the project in question,
> but that would most likely result in few people from other projects
> being involved, which is a bad thing).


Why is that a bad thing?  Why should people not involved in a project be
involved in deciding whether or not the project should exist?

Reminds me of an anecdote by Clay Shirky (
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html):

---

3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump
individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian
view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the
one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea
voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.

In the early Nineties, a proposal went out to create a Usenet news group for
discussing Tibetan culture, called soc.culture.tibet. And it was voted down,
in large part because a number of Chinese students who had Internet access
voted it down, on the logic that Tibet wasn't a country; it was a region of
China. And in their view, since Tibet wasn't a country, there oughtn't be
any place to discuss its culture, because that was oxymoronic.

Now, everyone could see that this was the wrong answer. The people who
wanted a place to discuss Tibetan culture should have it. That was the core
group. But because the one person/one vote model on Usenet said "Anyone
who's on Usenet gets to vote on any group," sufficiently contentious groups
could simply be voted away.