2009/12/20 Tim Starling [email protected]:
Tomasz Ganicz wrote:
2009/12/20 Laura Hale [email protected]:
This was posted to the Strategy wiki but I don't think I ever mentioned it on list. The case study itself can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/FHproposal.pdf . The blog entry about the case study can be found at http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1103 .
I think the study shows the old problems, which mainly comes from Wikimedia/Wikipedia history.
Meta wiki was first created as a place for meta-cross-project discussions including strategy planning as well. Then there was an assumption (IMHO false) that there is some sort of meta-cross-language-cross-projects-community which is allowed to make vital decisions by the system of consensus process mixed with voting system.It was soon found silly and many decisions were moved to Wikimedia committees that theoretically were created just as "advisory bodies" for Wikimedia Board of Trustees, but in fact the advice given by the committees was usually accepted by the Board.
Note that Meta was founded in 2001, so it significantly predates the Foundation and the non-Wikipedia projects. So the idea that decision-making there was "soon found silly" is a bit of an exaggeration. It predates the namespace feature in MediaWiki; it originally had a role similar to the Help and Wikipedia namespaces on the English Wikipedia today.
Well, My "story" is quite obviously just a simplification of the long history. For me the first contact with meta was in 2002 and it was about some sort of strategy planning - the discussion of the "second stage of Wikipedia" - i.e. the idea of cleaning-up the Wikipedia as it become large enough to be called a real encyclopedia :-) (roughly 100 000 articles). The second contact was at 2003 when we were voting for "ambassador" of Polish Wikipedia. Anyway - what is my main point is that the consensus/voting system in meta - was based on an idea that there is a kind of meta-community, a large group of people interested to look at Wikimedia movement as a whole, which has their origins in various Wikimedia project's communities, not only English Wikipedia and not only Wikipedias. In fact, it was always 90%+ English Wikipedia community + 9%+ major other languages Wikipedia's communities members + less than 1% of minor languages Wikipedia's and other Wikimedia project's communities. Therefore that system never worked effectively - as there was never such a real meta-community which could effectively represent the general Wikimedia projects' editors community of communities.