It’s amazing just how easy it can be to keep one’s head down, work in a specific area, & fail to notice the rest of the project burn down to the foundations.

Maybe I’m the Wikipedian equivalent of the old American Mountain Man, who would feel crowded whenever he saw the smoke of a neighbor’s fire; I know I’ve intentionally focussed my efforts on the more esoteric topics of Wikipedia. Although I doubt it: I’ve encountered a few vandals & counterproductive would-be contributors. Yet whenever I find myself stumbling over the smouldering embers of the latest flamewar, trying to figure out just what happened so I can determine if this conflict was something important, I’m amazed at how poorly any news travels amongst Wikipedians.

Geoff

(And, on Wikimedia, learning to program really well, because our lack of resources makes it nightmarish to do anything interesting, e.g. replacing categories tags you can run queries on while we live on MySQL.)

You talked about constitution, and two things strike me about that. First, that the constitutive articles are poorly formed and conflict with one another, which are problems. When a person with a particular POV sees that all POVs should be fairly represented, they find it hard to understand why presenting their POV fairly is not permitted, and why the power structure supports that. They aren’t aware that the “old boy network” trumps NPOV, so that editor X, clearly a POV pusher, friendless and not clued in on how to work the system, gets his arse banned, while editor Y, clearly a POV pusher, with lots of friends and clued in, is commended for fighting off “trolls”. Second, a ton of other “policy” documents have spun off from the original consitutive articles, and have created a huge bureaucratic nightmare. There is a huge leap from “you should try to get on” to “you should not breach policy 321B on civility”. On a talkpage the other day I saw a person suggest that the talkpage for KMRFC4 should not have been deleted under section G8 of CSD. Someone else said, no, it was deleted under IAR. And the first guy goes, yeah, okay, if it was under IAR.

Dude, an admonishment to ignore all the rules if they get in the way is now a statute — a rule in itself!

In my view, and not being a KoolAider, I know it counts for little, you need to recast the constitutive articles. They are nonsense as they stand and allow too much room for (mis)interpretation. Particularly NPOV. It conflicts with the sources policy really badly. Either you are presenting all views, or you are presenting the orthodox views of the Western world. Britannica has no problem stating that it does the latter. You also need to stop pretending that you have a small open-source workgroup. Give up the idea that you write policies by consensus. Restate the policies that you actually want followed and bin the rest. Shift as many “decisions” as possible into policy and away from OMOV: for instance, adminship should be conferred at an edit or time limit and removed in prescribed circumstances, or as I’ve suggested several times, rotated among active editors; articles should be deleted only on strict criteria, not on the judgement of editors, and not by voting them in or out.

Also, you very much need to do something about “group ownership” of articles. Some articles — article sets even — are strongly biased to one POV, simply because a group of editors can control them. 3RR was a terribly ill-conceived policy because rather than cool down editwarring, which it does not, it has created a tool for group ownership. If one person opposes another, all that either needs do to impose their view is find one other person to help them group-revert the article. We all know articles like this, and some of the editors involved are not widely moaned about because the moaners are “trolls” but because they are doing something worthy of moaning.

I understand Jimbo only read “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” recently. I sure wish it had been earlier, but now is much better than never.

Personally, I’d like to install the devs as Ultimate Authority. They are by structure anyway. There’s ranting by the Cunctator on the unfairness of this on the Nostalgia Wikipedia. Against Magnus, who I’d hope Cunc considers less evil now. Of course, the devs live by knowing a poisoned chalice when it’s described to them.

Other notable sociologists with interests in online communities have thought, spoken, and written about Wikipedia, but there is no silver bullet. Sunir Shah’s MeatBall is one example. There are others.

The lack of any sort leadership, like the Wizards of the MOO, is by choice. The first step in creating such a thing would be to convince Jimbo. A second step might be to evaluate the role of the Foundation, which is essentially limiting its activities to financial, legal, and fundraising matters.

The ArbCom? Jimbo? The Foundation? The Cabal? :)

When was the last really significant and sudden change put through that affected how the English Wikipedia operates or governs itself?

Alas, Wikipedia has no wizards.

The population is too large and you simply have no way of a significant majority to agree to any major change in the status quo.

I believe you have only two viable options:

a) create a fork and lay down the ground rules from the start (the Citizendium way)

b) try the [[boiling frog]] / [[stone soup]] approach: introduce small steps that slowly, gradually move the project towards your goal, but every step is below the pain threshold of the mob. This is somewhat similar to what’s happening with the fair use rules or gradually limiting the editing rights of anonymous editors. This can take several years to implement though.