[Foundation-l] The role of the board

Mon Apr 18 08:58:20 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>If your question is: will there ever come a day when the community
>undertakes a vote of some kind to do away with neutrality or the
>principle of free licensing, then my answer is: not if I can help it.
>And this is not me _against_ the community, but rather this is my
>promise to the community, to defend it and not make hasty decisions that
>would lead to the potential corruption of our ideals.
>  
>
I agree with that, but I don't think those scenarios are likely to come 
up, and certainly not very often.  In the more common case, there are 
issues on which reasonable people can disagree within the scope of 
Wikipedia's mission, and on those I think deferring to the community in 
large part makes some sense.

I don't necessarily mean holding votes on everything, but at least 
recognizing that in principle this isn't a top-down organization, but 
rather a community that largely works on its own to write a high-quality 
encyclopedia.  The community resolves disputes over articles, develops 
policies on specific projects, and so on, with a legal organization that 
provides servers, loose guidance, and suggestions, and a baseline 
assurance that nothing is straying unacceptably from the Foundation's 
mission (abandoning neutral viewpoint or something of that sort).

There seems to be a tendency lately, since we have a board, to just dump 
all decisions onto it as a convenient arbiter ("this should be a Board 
decision"), which I think would be a mistake.

-Mark