[Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

Wed Jan 19 09:04:51 UTC 2011

I basically agree that the big communities are now too big to take major
course changing community decisions. I do not follow so closely what is
going on in en.wp, however, the never-ending-story of flagged revisions
could be a good example. Another never-ending-story on Global arbcom /
Wikicouncil / whatever level it got stuck now is another one. I remember
still how in the middle of tough but slowly progressing discussion on
global admins on Meta within a day several hundred en.wp users apparently
unhappy with the fact that somebody may be rolling back their edits came,
voted no, and the proposal was dead. Most of them never participated in the
discussion and have never been seen on meta. 

Having said that, I must add that I am pessimistic. I believe that the
Board / Foundation will not take any steps until it is obvious to everybody
that there major problems (for instance, a major fork or smth). This is the
reason I think Amir's proposal does not have a chance. It may be still
implemented on smaller wikis (say below 500K articles) since the
communities may decide to implement it, but currently not on the biggest
projects.

Cheers 
Yaroslav

On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:02:54 -0500, Stephanie Daugherty
<sdaugherty at gmail.com> wrote:
> I personally am not convinced here that we at at the point yet where we
> have
> this level of community brokenness, but we are getting very close if we
> aren't there already. The consensus process used at the individual
project
> level oftentimes breaks down entirely on very contentious issues with as
> little as a dozen participants in a discussion. Governance by consensus
is
> an important part of our heritage and future, but as currently
implemented,
> it holds us a prisoner of our own inertia in some key areas.
> 
> This is a major threat to the future of several large WMF projects, and
one
> that has been getting some media attention, particularly by naysayers. I
> honestly don't think these issues alone can cause us to fail, but I do
> believe that if ignored long enough, they will create a set of
conditions
> that will allow it to happen. Once conditions become intolerable to the
> most
> dedicated members of a community, the possibility of a "mainstream" fork
-
> a
> fork that takes the bulk of the community with it - begins to become a
> viable prospect.
> 
> The fallout, obviously, would be enormous. There are a few readily
apparent
> ways that I see that we can reach such a point.
> 
>    - The projects become ungovernable, and the resulting chaos results
in a
>    political (in a wikipolitics sense) fork in order to establish a more
>    viable
>    structure. (Likely, and to some degree in motion already)
>    - The foundation itself goes rogue, and tries to impose conditions
>    unacceptable to it's member communities. (Unlikely, but not
>    inconceivable.)
>    - The foundation proves too unresponsive for the technical needs of
the
>    communities it serves. (Likely, already happening to some degree.)
>    - The foundation becomes insolvent. (Possible at some point if
>    fundraising efforts fail.)
> 
> 
> Our communities and the foundation itself need to look at these as
serious
> "threats from within" to our mission, and decide accordingly how we will
> deal with them. If we ignore them, and keep our head in the sand, one or
> more of them may eventually happen, and the outcome won't be pretty.
> 
> -Steph
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