[Foundation-l] A proposal for organisation

[Jan Kulveit]

On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 12:27:47PM +0200, Anthere wrote:
> Jan Kulveit wrote:

> > One dissimilarity - what are the "projects"? In the sense of ASF it
> > may be Wikipedia, Wikinews, Commons, etc.  Here the projects are 
> > language versions of "meta-projects". 
> > Commiters have common languages - code and English. Wikimedia 
> > projects do not. You can hardly effectively oversight a Wikimedia 
> > project if you dont understand the language. => question - if you take 
> > board members and their freinds, and maybe even theirs friends, does it 
> > cover the spectrum of Wikimedia languages? I would guess it doesn't.
> 
> If course it does not...
> I would be tempted to say that Wikimedia projects are the projects (so, 
> Wikipedia, Wikinews etc...), rather than by breaking down to language. 

Thats nice idea and I would like it to be that way, but is it reality?
In social sense, how much are the people from various language connected?
Do they form one community, pay attention to the same disscussions?

> Why so ? Because even if they have a different language, the various 
> language versions share the same goals (or precisely *should* share the 
> same goal), the same needs and the same threats.
> 

They share ultimate goal, but wether thay have the same needs and  
threats is questionable. Wikipedias are very different in size and 
age and needs and threats may scale differently with size.

For example the problem of en: with libelous articles about living perosns 
is practically nonexistent in cs: - the RC are of such size that still 
every new article is inspected by several users. Problems which led to
semi-protection on en: can be easily solved by hand - if there is an 
attempt to vandalize an article about a controversial politician in 
average one in a weeks, its easy to revert it by hand. If the frequency 
is once per minute, it makes normal editing impossible. Etc. 

Apart from that, the communites may be in various stages of 
[[meatball:WikiLifeCycle]]. Somewhere the community is just finding
its way how to decide policy issues and if someone wants make a new
recommendation/policy, all he has to do is be bold and write it. 
Elsewhere it a formal process with voting and, elsewhere matter of 
weeks of wikipolitics and  reading of megabytes of old talk,...

> A direction of thought would be to examine to areas of authority of the 
> PMC. Here are my suggestions
> * ensuring all projects are following the same goal
Sure, but thats very broad.

> * overseeing tm issues (the project logo, the project tm, domain names...)
That's IMO more suitable task for one specialized tm/domains officer of
the foundation. (should be one person responsible for dealing with
firestormforces in case of wikipedia.eu, other for wikimedia.eu, yet another 
for www.wikimania.eu?)

> * overseeing the general threats facing this particular project (legal 
> threats faced by wikiquote are definitly different from those faced by 
> Wikipedia)
As I wrote above, threats scale. There may be wider difference among
Wikipedias than among projects in general.

> * overseeing the licencing issue of the project (note that this 
> naturally occured when wikinews chose another set of licensing... for 
> all language version wide)
That doesnt seem practical. While in theory, language versions are 
independent of countries, in practice in many cases law of some country 
is more equal than some other. (eg image licensing issues)

> * oversee technical needs (wikiversity or wiktionary needs are specific 
> to a project, not to a language version)
Dont forget Commons, which are even more different :)

> etc...
>
What in areas where responsibility toward foundation may clash with
will of project contributors? Overseeing the threats - ok, but in case
of legal threats, who will be that one to interfere with the normal editor 
process of the project, and who will be liable for the results?
 
> Naturally, the PMC can not cover all languages version. But if that 
> committee has 20 members (for example), I guess they will always cover 
> more languages than the current board ;-)
> 
> > Another dissimilarity is in the existence of local chapters. How do
> > they fit in the above scheme?
> 
> I do not see why local chaters would get a specific involvement in the 
> PMC scheme.
> They could get involved in the membership scheme by also having up to a 
> certain number of representative on the Foundation.
> 
> > Anyway, it would solve some current problems, but not all. 
> 
> Sure.
> 
> Remind me what are the other problems you have in mind ?
>

It was allready disscussed here. Generally the overwhelming scope of 
board members work, from long-term planning to investigating trollish 
email complains about checkuser abuse.

If you wanted more specificic examples what bother me - I  won't give 
examples of problems in day-to-day tasks, but in longterm perspective 
IMO there are some things which are talked about for years, it seems 
everybody agrees, yet there are very little visible results. Single 
login, some "stable version/validation/1.0/..." support, etc.

Jan Kulveit