[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors}

[Ian Woollard]

The problems are those things where there's a trade-off.

For example, a highly productive member may be very abrasive.

Are they too abrasive for their productivity or not? In other words,
are they of net benefit to the project or not?

That's a trade-off.

If you don't consider it as a trade-off then bad things happen, you can lose
the most productive members.

Basically whenever there's a tradeoff, consensus on any individual
thing (e.g. 'civility') is highly likely to fail- that everyone should
be civil will normally be consensus, but what about other factors
surrounding contributors? Consensus on civility would be that everyone
uncivil MUST be banned!!!!

That's where leadership of one form or another comes in; you have to
say that civility is important, and how important other things are as
WELL. It's the relative importance that matters.

What arbcom does is that the candidates state what they stand for on the
areas that have to be traded off and then they get elected and make
decisions (hopefully) along the lines that they were voted in for.
That's why arbcom more or less works.

What other trade offs are there in/around the Wikipedia?

Other areas might be things like policies, there very much are areas
where people are deliberately writing the policies differently in
different parts so that they can delete things they don't like, even
though the policies, on the whole, probably don't permit them to do
that; if you write something into the corner of a policy somewhere and
then edit war that to stick with a group, then it's very hard to
remove, even if people in general looked at them wouldn't agree with
it.

So the Wikipedia could go to more of a parliamentary type system where
parliament writes the policies and tries to keep them consistent.

What other trade-offs do people see?

-- 
-Ian Woollard