On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Stephanie Daugherty <sdaughe...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 5:48 PM, masti <mast...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> why should tht be decided on foundation level? Do you think communities >> are so broken that they cannot make their own decisions? >> This would be the only reason to start discussing enforcement of such >> major changes >> > > > I personally am not convinced here that we at at the point yet where we have > this level of community brokenness, but we are getting very close if we > aren't there already. The consensus process used at the individual project > level oftentimes breaks down entirely on very contentious issues with as > little as a dozen participants in a discussion. Governance by consensus is > an important part of our heritage and future, but as currently implemented, > it holds us a prisoner of our own inertia in some key areas. > > This is a major threat to the future of several large WMF projects, and one > that has been getting some media attention, particularly by naysayers. I > honestly don't think these issues alone can cause us to fail, but I do > believe that if ignored long enough, they will create a set of conditions > that will allow it to happen. Once conditions become intolerable to the most > dedicated members of a community, the possibility of a "mainstream" fork - a > fork that takes the bulk of the community with it - begins to become a > viable prospect. > > The fallout, obviously, would be enormous. There are a few readily apparent > ways that I see that we can reach such a point. > > - The projects become ungovernable, and the resulting chaos results in a > political (in a wikipolitics sense) fork in order to establish a more viable > structure. (Likely, and to some degree in motion already) > - The foundation itself goes rogue, and tries to impose conditions > unacceptable to it's member communities. (Unlikely, but not inconceivable.) > - The foundation proves too unresponsive for the technical needs of the > communities it serves. (Likely, already happening to some degree.) > - The foundation becomes insolvent. (Possible at some point if > fundraising efforts fail.) > > > Our communities and the foundation itself need to look at these as serious > "threats from within" to our mission, and decide accordingly how we will > deal with them. If we ignore them, and keep our head in the sand, one or > more of them may eventually happen, and the outcome won't be pretty. > > -Steph
Question - When was the last time something like this was proposed on en.wikipedia, or on wikien-l? I agree that there are some things which have been very difficult to get or move consensus on, but I don't know that there would necessarily be enough opposition to prevent successful implementation of a split permissions level approach on en.wp right now. I don't recall a prior proposal but I don't pretend to be able to follow all the policy threads going on across the many sites and lists and umpteen pages successfully. If one was floated and failed, a pointer is fine, and we can go from there. If one hasn't been floated - why not take this opportunity and do so, and see what happens? -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
