On Wednesday 20 August 2003 05:07, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
And these written policies are apparently
developed
in back rooms with no input from the community.
Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly
against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the
unwashed masses.
I don't agree with either of these sentences.
No, I'm sure you don't -- they are not there for anyone to agree with, they
are there to attempt to make my point.
I don't see any way for
our policy development process to be any more open to input from the
community. I can't think of a less secretive or more noisy way to
organize anything. There are no back rooms here -- everything is done
in public, with wide advertising throughout the system of how it's
done. We're always open to suggestions, of course, but I think the
system right now is a model of public accountability.
Except mav suddenly seems to think that a unilateral policy change without any
discussion or even notice is OK. I don't remember that little detail being
advertised anywhere in the system.
The second sentence bewilders me completely. What do
your scare
quotes around 'policy' mean?
They mean I'm assuming mav doesn't realize the full implications of what he's
arguing for.
What do you mean by 'forcing openness'?
Somehow our openness is *imposed* on
the world?
I'm unsurprised that this confused you, it wasn't the best way to put it. But
it's being forced upon those that should have had a say in the policy and did
not.
And finally, I certainly don't agree with the
notion of 'unwashed
masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook. The very
foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do
extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate
hierarchies of control.
The hierarchy that appears to have fallen into place unplanned is not
elaborate at all. It has two levels: Admins - Others.
An admin made a unilateral policy change, and it's being essentially ignored
or defended by other admins on the grounds that they think the policy is a
good one.
One wonders what would have happened if *I* had made a unilateral policy
change.