[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikiquality-l] Current Status

[Nathan]

The problem is that we have been basing changes around the idea of
consensus decision making. If you reduce or alter the threshold
required for decision making, you are essentially introducing a new
principle of authority. This may not be bad, but obviously people will
feel disenfranchised to some extent if decisions are taken based on
something other than the established metric.

To my mind, an element of leadership is required in order to
efficiently manage Wikipedia. Efficiency isn't necessarily a shared
goal, however; I would suggest that there are a number of people who
view the community and its style of management as an element nearly as
crucial as the encyclopedia itself. I think it would be foolish of
Wikipedia to ignore the lessons learned about representative
leadership of large communities: consensus management works especially
well in a small community - as the number of individuals involved
expands, consensus becomes harder to reach and other forms of
management must be considered.

The method of addressing this problem of organization, which is
systemic, is not to ride roughshod over current practices and ignore
opposition. Fix the underlying problem first, and we won't have
Rollbackersaurus redux.

On Jan 14, 2008 11:12 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 1/14/08, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
> > Yes, I'd say you're being unduly pessimistic.  Rollback was a
> > trivial, unimportant change that a few people wanted.  Flagged
> > revisions is an important, beneficial change that everybody wants.
> > There *is* a difference (I hope).
>
> Maybe. Groups of people tend to be highly risk averse. It's to me
> unproven that decision making processes based on large groups are
> capable of large scale innovation. This is the one thing that I find
> disconcerting about the rollback episode: if we need 80%+ of support
> for everything, how can we ever hope to make changes to the
> fundamentals, like getting rid of wiki syntax in favor of rich text
> editing, or implementing a better discussion system?
>
> Sometimes, some people _will_ be unhappy, and sometimes you _will_
> have to allow yourself to make a mistake, if you want to be able to
> also improve.
> --
> Erik Möller
>
>
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