On 5/2/07, David Gerard dgerard@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.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l