[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their active numbers

[David Goodman]

Neither they nor anyone else   knows how to do this at our scale in as
open a structure as ours. Most ideas tend to retreat towards one form
or another of centralized control over content or to division of the
project to reduce the scale. That it is possible to organize well
enough to do  what we've done on our scale, is proven by the
result--an enormously useful product for the world in general. That we
could do better is probable, since the current structure is almost
entirely ad hoc, but there is no evidence as to what will work better.
Intensely democratic structures have one characteristic form of
repression of individuality, and controlled structures another.  The
virtue of division is to provide smaller structures adapted to
different methods, so that individuals can find one that is tolerable,
but this loses the key excitment of working together on something
really large.

My own view is that we should treat this as an experiment, and pursue
it on its own lines as far as it takes us.

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<abd at lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> if the
> structure were functional. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the
> founders of Wikipedia did not know how to put together a project that
> could maintain unity and consensus when the scale became large.



-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG