On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Marc Riddell<michaeldavi...@comcast.net> wrote: > And it is this control group, this "consolidation of power" which was > described earlier in this discussion, that is keeping the Project from > reaching its full potential. This issue has been brought up many times in > the past, but each time has been conveniently ignored by this group - which > in psych language constitutes denial. In fact, this practice of ignoring > persons and/or issues they don't want to confront appears to be a handy > refuge for members of this group. There appears to be a fear in some of the > more forceful in this group that, if they loosen their grip, they will be > left behind. Perhaps they will if they don't grow with it. In any case, this > is one of the most pressing issues facing the Project today. And one, if not > confronted, which will cause the Project to fall into mediocrity as newer, > more tolerant, more innovative projects come into being.
Fully agreed, especially with the last couple of sentences. ... And except the last one. There will be no similar project to Wikimedia, at least during this century. Projects like Wikipedia are extremely expensive. Which [rational] projects have or had one million of direct contributors? Great Wall, Chinese electrical system, Indian railway system? Maybe. Wikipedia had momentum (and because of that Jimmy's role is priceless) and it is very hard that we'll see another project of such dimensions soon. As we are inside of the project, we are not able to realize the dimensions of what we are building. The biggest number of articles, number of words, contributors... -- are just trees in the wood which we have created. Numbers are just statistical facts which are not important as is. But, all of them make a wood which existed never before (and, probably, which won't exist for a long time again). The point is that we, now and here, are making much bigger decisions than how to keep ~10TB of data and build another 100TB of [very useful] data in the next couple of years. Our work affects the whole human civilization. Would we be able to keep or not our projects as healthy places, this would give the answer which path would be used by our civilization. We have two non-exclusive possibilities: (1) centralized _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
