[WikiEN-l] So you think you can be a Wikipedia article

Ray Saintonge saintonge at telus.net
Wed Jul 26 21:20:36 UTC 2006


Oldak Quill wrote:

>On 25/07/06, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>No management expert will ever tell you that a group of 1000 people
>>will ever get anywhere in strategy terms very fast. It is simply too
>>large to facilitate effective communication and quick agreement on
>>issues. As you say, there is a core community group missing. There is
>>the board and related personnel at the top (aka, OFFICE) , followed by
>>a small group of judges(aka, bcrats) who dont make policy so much as
>>rule on it, and then there are the so called "janitors" (aka, sysops).
>>
>>Following the highly successful national model with Cabinet, Courts,
>>and Parliament, it is the parliament that is missing. Right now, and
>>possibly from the wiki culture, the parliament is traditionally the
>>whole community with anyone who wants to have a say being able to do
>>so. I would contend that the size of such a parliament is limited in
>>its ability to make effective decisions.
>>
>>The current heirarchy does not place any special policy related
>>privileges on the sysop layer, and I am not about to say that it
>>should, but in ignoring the Parliament layer it is missing an
>>essential branch in the proven three prong, "separation of powers"
>>model.
>>    
>>
>Importantly, Wikipedia is not a nation state and can't be compared to
>one. 
>
Surely we would not want to be compared to an obsolete concept.  
Corporations have learned to transcend the boundaries of nation states 
for the greater benefit of the corporations.  Offsetting those forces is 
not easy.

>Our "judiciary" simply settles a few fights and determines a few
>basic punishments: partial exclusion and total exclusion). Since
>Wikipedia is a digital project with only hundreds of active editors,
>representative democracy is not necessary. Direct democracy has thus
>far served our needs well, and will continue to do so for the
>foreseeable future.
>
How do you propose to thwart the tyranny of the majority in a direct 
democracy?

>Just out of interest, who are you suggesting plays the role of
>executive/cabinet?
>  
>
Looks like you still need to figure out how a monarchy works. :-)

Ec




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