[WikiEN-l] Parker Peters's comments

[Ray Saintonge]

daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

>Originally, I planned to answer Parker Peters's email. I wanted to say  
>something, at least, but I didn't want it to be trite. I didn't want to defend  
>some admin actions while agreeing with him about others. There will be (have  
>been?) plenty of people to do that. In the end, all of that is irrelevant,  
>because it is his perception of the problem that really matters, not whether the  
>problem is truly relevant in particular instance X or Z. It is a macro-issue,  
>and it deserves macro-answers, or alternately, macro-changing in our  thinking.
>
I'm glad to see that you have grasped what is important in Parker's message.

>I think the real issue can be boiled down to a single statement: "Wikipedia  
>is big ... really, really big." As of yesterday, Alexa ranks us the number 12  
>website in the world, and we are still climbing. In English alone, we have 
>close  to 1.5 million articles and 6 million total pages. We have over 2.4  
>million users and close to 600 thousand images. I don't know how  many edits we 
>are getting per day, per hour, per second, but I can  only assume that it is a 
>very substantial number. 
>
Yep!  According to [[List of countries by population]]  this puts us 
between Oman and Latvia, and we have a bigger growth rate. :-)

There are dangers when you become big without ever having learned to 
think big.  The governance principles that were fine for a small 
community may not have scaled very well in a large and diverse population.

>No single person, or even small group of people, can tend to something this  
>big, or even familiarize themselves with all its nooks and crannies. Yet we 
>have  to. That is the challenge. 
> 
>There are 1,015 people with admin powers, and for various reasons it is  
>assumed that the burden of responsibility lies with them (it really doesn't,  
>since it should rest on the entire community, but that is a different story). Of  
>these thousand or so people, some are more active than others. Some can be 
>found  patrolling the projects every hour of every day, while others pop in for a 
>few  minutes every few months, and still others are gone for good. 
>
That 1,015 is only for the ones on en:Wikipedia.  Elsewhere different 
policies and procedures have developped which work just as well, and 
perhaps better.  There is nothing to be alarmed about in the different 
rates of participation as long as those differences are not used as an 
excuse for making one person's efforts and ideas superior to those of 
another.

>As such, the burden is overwhelming. There is so much to do, so much that  
>needs tending, but we've grown faster than our admnistrative structure, and the  
>fissures are beginning to show. By piling on the load, it is only natural 
>that  admins (and here I mean people who perform admin tasks, whether they are 
>admins  or not) begin to feel frustrated and burn out. It is especially onerous 
>when  every action is going to be viewed by people who will challenge it--and 
>the  admin--any way they can. Do you risk making all the rapid decisions that 
>need to  be made, one after the other, even if it means that some bad 
>decisions will  inevitably be made? Do you risk maintaining old procedures, which once 
>worked  quite well but are starting to buckle under the weight, or do you 
>experiment  with something new and untested? If there is to be change, what are 
>the  priorities? If there is to be discussion about change, at what point do we 
>end  the talking and decide to act?
>
There are similarities between this and the way that Israelis make 
domestic and local decisions.  (This has nothing to do with 
Palestinians, or Israel's foreign relations.)  There are probably 
positive models that we can draw from their example.  The situation can 
be completely maddening for a person whose job it is to implement policy.

The person who is comfortable in his own corner of the Wiki, and who is 
able to make decisions that are easily accepted by everyone in that 
sub-community, may be completely unsuitable to the task in a bigger 
community. 

The problems need to be reviewed at the broadest possible level without 
descending to the point where all we are considering is individual pet 
peeves by people who can't look beyond their personal involvement.  If a 
vandal fighter is so taken up by his role that every aspect of his 
involvement in Wikipedia is tainted by his vandal-fighting perspective, 
he has limited his usefulness to his own area of operation.  He has a 
hard time seeing how his efforts fit in with everyone else's completely 
different efforts.

Most people challenge a decision because they do not feel temselves to 
be a part of the decision, though they may themselves be poor decision 
makers.  Properly applied consensus can help make them a part of the 
decision.  There will still be some people who challenge everything as 
some part of a game to be won, but we do best not to spend too much time 
with these; nothing silences a troll more effectively than silence.

One of the biggest deficiencies at Wikimania 2006 was not having a 
session where those who have been directly and seriously involved with 
the Wikimedia projects could deal with the kind of problems that you 
raise.  There were a lot of lecture based sessions with one person at 
the head of the room could be asked questions at the end of his speech.  
These sessions included many visitors and press who just wanted to find 
out about Wikipedia, but it did nothing to find solutions to the very 
real problems that are a natural part of rapid growth.  The sessions 
seemed to do no more than nibble at the edges of the problems.  In some 
of the informal conversations that took place after the conference was 
over there was a clear need expressed that we desparately need a major 
session at Wikimania 2007, closed to all but active editors, to address 
the problems that need to be addressed.  The unassigned time slot 
between hacking days and the opening of the main conference could serve 
for that.

>These are some of the real issues that Parker Peters is raising. Note that  
>they are dilemmas, and the nature of a dilemma is that there is no right 
>answer,  except perhaps from the safety of hindsight. And yet, decisions have to be 
>made. 
>
At the rate things move I don't know how many of these decisions can 
wait until Wikimania 2007.  I don't think that it's good for your mental 
health to put yourself in the position where all these decision rest on 
your shoulders.  Nor should anyone else be put into that position.  
Doing things that way maximizes the possibility of bad decisions.  
Still, some decisions MUST be made.  As few as possible should be 
irreversible, at least until the next Wikimania.

Yes we are huge.  This is complicated by the fact that there is no model 
for this kind of organization.  There is no reliable body of laws to 
guide all our practices.  There are no comparable multi-national 
non-profits with such a grass roots base.  Profit oriented 
multinationals have different priorities, and easily available material 
resources for implementing their goals.  It boggles the mind, and 
frankly, I am humble enough to say that I don't know what the fuck we 
should be doing.

Ec