[Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Stephanie Daugherty
<sdaugherty at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 5:48 PM, masti <mastigm at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> why should tht be decided on foundation level? Do you think communities
>> are so broken that they cannot make their own decisions?
>> This would be the only reason to start discussing enforcement of such
>> major changes
>>
>
>
> I personally am not convinced here that we at at the point yet where we have
> this level of community brokenness, but we are getting very close if we
> aren't there already. The consensus process used at the individual project
> level oftentimes breaks down entirely on very contentious issues with as
> little as a dozen participants in a discussion. Governance by consensus is
> an important part of our heritage and future, but as currently implemented,
> it holds us a prisoner of our own inertia in some key areas.
>
> This is a major threat to the future of several large WMF projects, and one
> that has been getting some media attention, particularly by naysayers. I
> honestly don't think these issues alone can cause us to fail, but I do
> believe that if ignored long enough, they will create a set of conditions
> that will allow it to happen. Once conditions become intolerable to the most
> dedicated members of a community, the possibility of a "mainstream" fork - a
> fork that takes the bulk of the community with it - begins to become a
> viable prospect.
>
> The fallout, obviously, would be enormous. There are a few readily apparent
> ways that I see that we can reach such a point.
>
>   - The projects become ungovernable, and the resulting chaos results in a
>   political (in a wikipolitics sense) fork in order to establish a more viable
>   structure. (Likely, and to some degree in motion already)
>   - The foundation itself goes rogue, and tries to impose conditions
>   unacceptable to it's member communities. (Unlikely, but not inconceivable.)
>   - The foundation proves too unresponsive for the technical needs of the
>   communities it serves. (Likely, already happening to some degree.)
>   - The foundation becomes insolvent. (Possible at some point if
>   fundraising efforts fail.)
>
>
> Our communities and the foundation itself need to look at these as serious
> "threats from within" to our mission, and decide accordingly how we will
> deal with them. If we ignore them, and keep our head in the sand, one or
> more of them may eventually happen, and the outcome won't be pretty.
>
> -Steph

Question -

When was the last time something like this was proposed on
en.wikipedia, or on wikien-l?

I agree that there are some things which have been very difficult to
get or move consensus on, but I don't know that there would
necessarily be enough opposition to prevent successful implementation
of a split permissions level approach on en.wp right now.

I don't recall a prior proposal but I don't pretend to be able to
follow all the policy threads going on across the many sites and lists
and umpteen pages successfully.

If one was floated and failed, a pointer is fine, and we can go from there.

If one hasn't been floated - why not take this opportunity and do so,
and see what happens?


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com