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

[Fred Bauder]

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

Good propaganda, and it worked, but our most productive members are not
habitually nasty, only a few are.

> 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.

> -Ian Woollard
>

That is a good example. I wanted to change Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is
not the other day and just went and changed it. Put a note on the talk
page and on the effected project page and that was all there was to it.

I doubt I would have even bothered to try if I had to get onto an agenda,
convince a dozen people unfamiliar with the issue that there was a
problem, that a certain change should be made, etc.

However, we have had experience with people skulking around changing
policy in order to have something to point to when they were violating
every policy Wikipedia has.

Fred