On 4/11/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 4/11/07 12:28 PM, Erik Moeller at erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
How is an open, continuing debate about a variety of issues an indication of "governance broken beyond repair"? Inflammatory comments like this are unhelpful.
I don't believe it's beyond repair, but can you honestly say that among these "variety of issues" there has not been some serious concerns about the state of leadership in WP?
There are also legitimate disagreements about the equivalents of "fundamental pillars"; Larry clearly believes that anonymity and levelling the expert/non expert playing field are bad for any project, and took the cause and effects of the Essjay incident as an example of some of that.
From the viewpoint that having people fake credentials is bad, anyone
looking at Wikipedia as-is has to conclude that we're pretty close to fundamentally and structurally broken.
I don't think he's right; he has a point, but experience has shown that the thousands of monkeys we do have are creating some pretty good Shakespeare. That said, Larry's putting his energy where his mouth is, and trying a restart of the WP concept remolded along the lines he thinks fix the things he thinks are broken with WP, at no small investment of his own effort. He clearly isn't "over" his personal issues with Wikipedia, but he's also moving past it.
I think I can see where Erik is coming from in taking this as a percieved attack; I just think it's easier for us not to do that.