At 12:45 AM 6/1/2010, David Goodman wrote: >Neither they nor anyone else knows how to do this at our scale in as >open a structure as ours.
While I understand the opinion, how do you know that? Isn't it a tad limiting to believe that nobody knows how to deal with our problem? Perhaps the expertise exists, but we haven't been looking for it or connecting with it, or, worse, rejecting it when it's suggested, out of a *belief* that it couldn't work, but without actual experience. The model I know that worked, and spectacularly, was Alcoholics Anonymous. Grew rapidly. The scale became *very* large, particularly in terms of active members, most registered accounts on Wikipedia, I suspect, are inactive. Now, AA certainly is also different. I merely suggest that, with AA, some specific organizational concepts were developed, from the study of the history of organizations, and were expressed and became solidly accepted traditions that are actually practiced, and the result was a highly unified organization without central control. Branfman et al call these "starfish organizations," because you can cut them up and they re-form from the pieces, and he distinguishes them from "spider organizations," where if you cut off the head, the organization dies. Most of the recent thinking in this area looks to hybrid organizations. AA, as an example, has a central office, which is operated by a nonprofit corporation with a board that is partly elected by the World Service Conference and partly self-appointed. The analogy here would be the WMF, Inc. However, to take this analogy further, Wikipedia would be a collection of independent "meetings" that voluntarily associate, and membership in each meeting would be open, self-selected. The resemblance stops when people who are *not* members of a meeting impose control over the meeting. That isn't done with AA. Period. Yet, without any central control, people can go to an AA meeting almost anywhere and will *mostly* find the same consensus, but it's not an oppressive consensus (usually! AA members are still human). Members are welcome to disagree, and express the disagreement, and they won't be kicked out. Unless they actually disrupt the meeting directly, and I've not heard of it. I'm not an alcoholic, though, so I've only been to open meetings, not to closed ones, only open to alcoholics. >Most ideas tend to retreat towards one form >or another of centralized control over content or to division of the >project to reduce the scale. My own work suggests continuing the ad hoc local organization that does, in fact, work very well, but moving away from centralized control imposed coercively, distributing control, perhaps to a series of "Volumes" that are organized by topic area. But what I really propose is that process be established for the development and discovery of consensus with efficiency. It does require that discussion be reduced in scale, and there are lots of traditional ways to do that, known to work. I.e, discussion takes place in a hierarchy of discussions. Classically, a committee system. The committees merely collect evidence and argument, organizing it and making recommendations, they do not control. But if they do their work well, their reports will be adopted centrally by whatever process exists there, or, if something was overlooked, it will be sent back to committee for further work in the light of what happened "higher up." The ad hoc Wikipedia process does this, but with informality, for the most part, and the structure that it would fit into has not been completed. Probably the "top level" would be an elected representative body, and for that to function to maximize consensus, it needs to be thoroughly representative, and my work with voting systems leads me to understand how to do that efficiently and thoroughly. It could be amazingly simple. From the AA analogy, this body is actually only advisory, not exercising sovereign control. It would advise the community and the WMF. The WMF has legal control over the servers and the name "Wikipedia." But advice developed through consensus process is probably more powerful than centralized control. > That it is possible to organize well >enough to do what we've done on our scale, is proven by the >result--an enormously useful product for the world in general. That we >could do better is probable, since the current structure is almost >entirely ad hoc, but there is no evidence as to what will work better. I would not say "no evidence," but I'll certainly acknowledge that there is no proof. One of the problems is that the current structure has become so entrenched and so self-preserving that experiments, even conducted in ways that could not do damage (other than perhaps wasting the time of those who choose to participate in them), are crushed. WP:PRX was simply an experiment, it consisted only of a file structure, and established no control at all, no change in policy or guidelines. It did not establish voting, much less proxy voting as was claimed. It would not have given power to puppet masters, most notably because the last thing a puppet master wants to do is call attention directly to the connection. >Intensely democratic structures have one characteristic form of >repression of individuality, and controlled structures another. And then there are hybrids. >The >virtue of division is to provide smaller structures adapted to >different methods, so that individuals can find one that is tolerable, >but this loses the key excitment of working together on something >really large. Unless the individual structures have a voluntary coordinating superstructure. >My own view is that we should treat this as an experiment, and pursue >it on its own lines as far as it takes us. Sure. But, of course, there is WP:NOT. Which sometimes might be equivalent to WP:IS. Since, generally, Wikipedia is *also* many of the things that it supposedly is not. >On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax ><a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote: > > if the > > structure were functional. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the > > founders of Wikipedia did not know how to put together a project that > > could maintain unity and consensus when the scale became large. > > > >-- >David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG > >_______________________________________________ >WikiEN-l mailing list >WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org >To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: >https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
