[Foundation-l] Volunteer Council - some thoughts after a discussion on Wikimania

Mon Aug 4 17:46:10 UTC 2008

I think you should be careful in assuming that consensus is established, or
even indicated, based on an amorphous discussion at Wikimania (of which
there is, presumably, no record) composed of 40-50 people. The simple fact
is that the attendees are not necessarily representative of the whole
community, and as Ting's post demonstrates the outcome is detabale in any
case.

If you want to organize people with a common vision and begin working to
solve some problems you have identified, I don't think anyone would have a
problem with that - similar, essentially, to the way the Mediation Committee
and the Mediation Cabal work on en.wikipedia. What is puzzling, and where
the agreement starts to break down, is the persistent desire for an official
imprimatur or other mechanism to confer interwiki authority for the
volunteer council. You're absolutely entitled to setup a process for
arriving at solutions to problems where the authority required is no more
than that conferred by the consent of the parties, but beyond that you need
to demonstrate a community consensus. Wikimania discussions typically don't
work for that purpose.

Nathan