[WikiEN-l] Wikiquette "committee"

Fri Oct 3 15:35:48 UTC 2003

    > From: Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com>   

    > Wikipedia's goal is to make an encyclopedia, not a judicial system. Any
    > big debates that are not solved by mediation could just go on village
    > pump .. or, if it's really hard to resolve, the mailing list. A private
    > messaging system would be useful .. but more than that would be too
    > much.

You've managed to make me produce a wry smile! I sympathize sincerely with
your desire for a lack of bureacracy, but, alas, more structure and
procedures are the inevitable price you have to pay for success and its
Siamese twin, growth in size. (This is a process I lived though, painfully,
as the Internet and IETF grew from a handful of people.)

There's no avoiding it - all you can do is try and manage it so that it
happens in the least objectionable way. And you can't do that if you try and
stop it from happening...

People seem to be generally agreeable to the concept that we need a fairly
well-specified hierarchy of chastisements (or behaviour-modification tools,
whatever).

Equally, we need a *matching* hierarchy of entities to hand out those
chastisements - because the further up the hierarchy of chastisements you go,
the more serious they become, so they should be applied more carefully. That
generally means a larger circle of review, to make sure an error isn't being
made.

I really don't think VP, or the mailing list, should get involved except as a
last desperate resort. Those are very expensive resources, since they take
the time of everyone in the community. Use of such things simply won't scale
as the community grows larger.

(Now there would be a very interesting number to report, along with the
number of articles: the number of user-id's, or if you want to be picky, the
number who've done something in the last 60 days, to filter out the ones who
are no longer active. But I digress...)

I don't know about you, but I could have done without all the email this RK
thing has generated clogging my mailbox. I'd much rather have spent the time
working on articles...

	Noel