[WikiEN-l] So you think you can be a Wikipedia article

Tue Jul 25 06:38:08 UTC 2006

On 25/07/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 25/07/06, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:
> > No management expert will ever tell you that a group of 1000 people
> > will ever get anywhere in strategy terms very fast. It is simply too
> > large to facilitate effective communication and quick agreement on
> > issues. As you say, there is a core community group missing. There is
> > the board and related personnel at the top (aka, OFFICE) , followed by
> > a small group of judges(aka, bcrats) who dont make policy so much as
> > rule on it, and then there are the so called "janitors" (aka, sysops).
> >
> > Following the highly successful national model with Cabinet, Courts,
> > and Parliament, it is the parliament that is missing. Right now, and
> > possibly from the wiki culture, the parliament is traditionally the
> > whole community with anyone who wants to have a say being able to do
> > so. I would contend that the size of such a parliament is limited in
> > its ability to make effective decisions.
> >
> > The current heirarchy does not place any special policy related
> > privileges on the sysop layer, and I am not about to say that it
> > should, but in ignoring the Parliament layer it is missing an
> > essential branch in the proven three prong, "separation of powers"
> > model.
>
> Importantly, Wikipedia is not a nation state and can't be compared to
> one. Our "judiciary" simply settles a few fights and determines a few
> basic punishments: partial exclusion and total exclusion). Since
> Wikipedia is a digital project with only hundreds of active editors,
> representative democracy is not necessary. Direct democracy has thus
> far served our needs well, and will continue to do so for the
> foreseeable future.
>
> Just out of interest, who are you suggesting plays the role of
> executive/cabinet?

I do not see why Wikipedia operates with a totally new type of
community model that can't be at least compared to a proven durable
model.

Wikipedia is a digital project with over a thousand active editors.
That makes it a decent size community in my books. Direct democracy
may have gotten it this far but the problems with it are not going to
go away by simply saying that it will work for the foreseeable future.
There are numerous people on this list who have complaints about the
current structure, of which sockpuppeting is just one of them.

On the executive/cabinet role, I thought it was obvious that the
[[WP:OFFICE]] setup sets the base rules and makes day to day effective
immediately judgements when it thinks they are necessary.

Peter Ansell