[WikiEN-l] WP:V, WP:RS, WP:NOR and WP:ATT

[stevertigo]

On 3/21/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> Likely lesson: Wikipedia has exceeded process critical mass.  We now
> have more things going on more quickly than the existing static
> process can adequately track and keep people aware of.
>
> In a business, this sort of discovery triggers a round of executive
> and management soul-searching, followed by a painful round of process
> consultants, executive retreats, the creation of new business process
> management groups, a couple of new VPs, etc etc.

While I seem to remember some quote about the dangers of bureaucratic
mentality and its normative habit of forming committee's and
instituting more process and bloat, I don't think it improper to deal
with these issues in a more formal way.

Part of the problem is noise: the methods by which we communicate
openly are cluttered with noise, be it trolling, newbiance,
misconceptions, or just spam and bad email formatting.

A more comprehensive topic based threading system would seem to be
useful, not just for meta discussion on the mailing lists, but on
certain busy talk pages as well. This is a technical issue which Erik
alluded to with his comments about OTRS (and Wikipedia as a primary
source.) An ideal system would be organizable, flag-able and
integrable between email and wiki formats: an integration of messages
and documents.

The other problem is as many have said, scaling the structures of
governance to fit the larger community.  I'm of the opinion that
certain community-style things could be done to accomplish this, but
I'm likewise skeptical that such would just be more bureaucracy.  We
can of course try to visualise an expanded governance model:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/07/Org_chart.jpg/300px-Org_chart.jpg

-Stevertigo