[Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

Wed Jun 14 00:22:52 UTC 2006

On 6/13/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Exactly how is the community working to solve the problem of new
> articles being created which are never reviewed by anyone involved
> with the project?
>
Most of the solutions require developer support.  Mediawiki
development is rather hierarchical compared to the rest of Wikipedia,
and there's not a whole lot that most of the community *can* do.

I suppose community members could spend lots of time writing patches
to the Mediawiki code and take a chance that their patches will be
ignored like some of the ones that came before them.  But that's
asking a whole lot of people.

> Even things as simple as garbage being added to articles could be
> improved right away. For example, Article gets moved to
> Article/development. A copy is made back to article, a template added,
> page protected. Sitewide JS hacks fix up edit links for most browsers.
> Done. It's not perfect... but if successful mediawiki could be easily
> enhanced to support the model. We've been arguing and blowing hot air
> for at least a *year* on how to solve that problem, yet we've taken
> nearly no action. No one has come up with a perfect system, or at
> least if someone has no one has implemented it yet.  It's probably no
> possible to come up with a solution the the community can agree is
> good because our deadlock prevents us from building the experience
> needed to build a good solution or even evaluate the qualities of a
> proposal...   In some cases the community is simply terrible at
> decision making, someone long winded noncontributing naysayer able to
> come in and disrupt progress.
>
Ultimately it's up to the people who run the servers to decide what
solution they want.  Again, I don't see how more than a handful of
members of the community can help with making this decision.

Anthony