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@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 1/14/08, Steve Summit scs@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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