On 25/07/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/07/06, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@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. 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.
Just out of interest, who are you suggesting plays the role of executive/cabinet?
I do not see why Wikipedia operates with a totally new type of community model that can't be at least compared to a proven durable model.
Wikipedia is a digital project with over a thousand active editors. That makes it a decent size community in my books. Direct democracy may have gotten it this far but the problems with it are not going to go away by simply saying that it will work for the foreseeable future. There are numerous people on this list who have complaints about the current structure, of which sockpuppeting is just one of them.
On the executive/cabinet role, I thought it was obvious that the [[WP:OFFICE]] setup sets the base rules and makes day to day effective immediately judgements when it thinks they are necessary.
Peter Ansell