[WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these babies are ugly

[Charles Matthews]

AGK wrote:
> On 17 May 2010 20:45, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> when he plainly
>> said in about as many words this was a symbolic gesture to diffuse and
>> refocus criticism
>>     
>
> Mhrm, that's arguable. The flags that Jimbo relinquished meant that he
> could no longer do such things as delete Commons images. That's far
> from symbolic; in fact, it essentially is him resigning rights that
> the community had began to angrily demand be taken away from him.
>   
I think the "symbolic" part of Jimbo's place in the overall 
"constitution" (definitely scare quotes) is rather significant, though. 
There are three ways in which Jimbo interacts with the community:

1. direct editing or admin action;
2. exhortation and "pulling strings", i.e. getting others to do the 
things under 1;
3. the business he not inaccurately compares with being a constitutional 
monarch.

Of those (1) has been of minimal use in recent years, simply because it 
attracts so much attention. The current furore is perhaps the point at 
which it hits the buffers. Method (2) is how one expects a Board member 
to act. The point about (3) is that it is far from a dead letter on 
enWP, but its traction is much more tenuous elsewhere. It is perhaps not 
entirely coincidental that we are talking about Commons, which is not 
"disjoint" from enWP in the way that other wikis are.

Coming from a country without a written constitution, with a 
constitutional monarch, and where the monarch's role has been thoroughly 
debated over recent days, I may find this rather more intuitively 
accessible than those who assume constitutions are well-defined and 
"leaders" have to "act".

Charles