[WikiEN-l] Revealed! Why the community is on crack

[Anthony]

On 5/2/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Shirky says "Constitutions are a necessary component of large,
> long-lived, heterogenous groups." I've long spoken of Wikipedia's
> fundamental policies — neutrality, verifiability, no original
> research; assume good faith, no personal attacks, don't bite the
> newbies — as a constitution, and said that any process that violates
> them must be thrown out. The catch being there's not yet a way to
> enforce that.
>
I think you missed a key policy which is definitely a part of
Wikipedia's Constitution: "Wikipedia works by building consensus."
This is even listed as number one in the list of Wikipedia's "Key
policies".  And it's a meta-rule, a rule about how to make the rules.

> One thing Shirky strongly points out: "The third thing you need to
> accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some
> situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite
> common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one
> person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea
> voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in." You
> would probably believe the outrage when I applied the phrase "one
> moron one vote" to Requests for Adminship. That, by the way, is the
> prime example on English Wikipedia at present of a group that's being
> its own worst enemy. I think it's worse than Articles for Deletion.
>
> (And you'll see this 2003 essay speaks of Wikipedia as a project
> that's avoided that one. Whoops.)
>
I don't think the author was putting down voting, but rather putting
down the idea that members outside the "core group" have a vote which
is equal to that of members inside the core group.

Some examples of times when the core group of Wikipedians (which is
probably an overlap of most admins and some non-admins) were
"outvoted" by people outside the group would be useful in illustrating
this point.  I can think of lots of times, on RfA and AfD, when the
outside group was very loud, but off-hand I don't recall any times
when the outsiders successfully outvoted the core group.

> How to keep the community focused on the point of the exercise? What
> level of control does one apply to keep on track without killing off
> the liveliness?
>
>
> - d.
>
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