[WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)

Wed Dec 13 19:53:24 UTC 2006

On 12/13/06, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> David,
>
> I read it. A crowd can never come to a decision about anything; they can
> only make enough noise to call attention to the fact that a decision needs
> to be made. At some point, very early in its history, there was no
> Wikipedia
> crowd. How, and by whom, were the decisions made that evolved into what
> Wikipedia is now?

Essentially there's always been a Wikipedia crowd; by that I mean decisions
have never been terribly top-down. Larry Sanger was the master herder of the
early decision-making.

http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia unfortunately lacks a full
history (a good project for the Foundation to tackle) but you can see a
relatively well-formed set of early policies.

See also http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_commentary

In November Sanger started segregating policy suggestions he liked from
those he didn't to create meta.wikipedia.com (well, it's more complicated
than that, but that was part of the impetus).

This is also a good early page:
http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/Our_Replies_to_Our_Critics

Click around and learn more.

Marc
>
> > From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
> > Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 18:56:09 +0000
> > To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Categories (was: Hello)
> >
> > On 13/12/06, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> >> I am not suggesting that a "small committee" (your term) fix the
> problems of
> >> Wikipedia - just one small part of it. And, if flexibility leads to
> chaos
> >> then it does more harm than good - and is ultimately destructive.
> >
> >
> > The trouble is that this trick never works. See [[WP:PRO]] for an
> explanation.
> >
> >
> > - d.
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