Mailing List Archive

On 6/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales@wikia.com> wrote:

> I agree completely. I resist very strongly any separation of foundation
> and community.

How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united
in practice. I am aware it sounds very inclining to a certain cultural
background, but still daresay this idea itself can be applied to many
cases, specially we need to cooperate with each other.

Separation itself is nothing wrong. Separation without communication
nor collaboration is bad, or useless at best, assuredly.

If there is no separation, we require never two words or concepts: in
practice the community isn't involved into a certain matter which the
foundation cares for, and vice versa, I assume. If that sounds too
metaphisical or awkward, we might need another terminology, like
distinction, instead of separation.

--
Aphaia
aka
Kizu Naoko
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com
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On 6/14/06, Aphaia <aphaia@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales@wikia.com> wrote:
>
> > I agree completely. I resist very strongly any separation of foundation
> > and community.
>
> How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united
> in practice. I am aware it sounds very inclining to a certain cultural
> background, but still daresay this idea itself can be applied to many
> cases, specially we need to cooperate with each other.
>
> Separation itself is nothing wrong. Separation without communication
> nor collaboration is bad, or useless at best, assuredly.
>
> If there is no separation, we require never two words or concepts: in
> practice the community isn't involved into a certain matter which the
> foundation cares for, and vice versa, I assume. If that sounds too
> metaphisical or awkward, we might need another terminology, like
> distinction, instead of separation.

Thank you for that. This is exactly what I think we should tend towards.

Delphine

--
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> On 6/14/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 6/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I agree completely. I resist very strongly any separation of
foundation
> > > and community.
> >
> > How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united
> > in practice. I am aware it sounds very inclining to a certain cultural
> > background, but still daresay this idea itself can be applied to many
> > cases, specially we need to cooperate with each other.
> >
> > Separation itself is nothing wrong. Separation without communication
> > nor collaboration is bad, or useless at best, assuredly.
> >
> > If there is no separation, we require never two words or concepts: in
> > practice the community isn't involved into a certain matter which the
> > foundation cares for, and vice versa, I assume. If that sounds too
> > metaphisical or awkward, we might need another terminology, like
> distinction, instead of separation.
>
> Delphine:
> Thank you for that. This is exactly what I think we should tend towards.

'Separated in concept, united in practice'.
It would have been a great subtitle for an Alexander Dumas novel. ;)
Aphaia or Delphine can one of you explain what this means?

Let me explain what I meant with the statement that Jimmy commented on. I'll
try not to repeat myself too much, but rather to expand and explain.

The point made earlier about separation of foundation and community refers
to posts where people argue that the foundation has different
responsibilities, different legal liabilities, by necessity a different
modus operandi and even a different set of objectives, other than those of
the community. (paraphrasing here) Some made it sound as if the community
should mind its own business and let the foundation do what it knows is best
for all of us. (again paraphrasing) This is what I and others objected to.
We should not think of a foundation and a community as separate entities,
with operations that are mutually unconnected. I'm glad Jimmy endorsed this
view, though I am not sure we agree on the finer details, where decision
making dynamics are involved.

Of course foundation and community are not identical. Not a dualistic
wave/particle entity. They are different. The foundation and the board take
responsibility for judicial and administrative obligations and committments
that need to be dealt with daily. By paying our bills, signing contracts,
guarding our rights, etc they serve the community. That is all fine with me.

The crux of the debate as I see it is: Can the foundation have an autonomous
role in defining Wikimedias long term goals, and even more important the
final say? Can the CEO and/or the board formulate Wikimedia long term
strategy by itself, decide which deals to strike with what kind of
corporations on which terms, and which grants to accept on which terms,
without clear, written and binding general principles a.k.a. mandate from
the community? Can the board appoint members from outside the community
(still hypothetical but hinted to by Jimmy) and explain afterwards that this
was the perfect candidate (compare CEO), or should the board use reason and
arguments to convince the community of its wise proposal and possibly stand
corrected ?

Whether discussions on this list are representative for the vox populi is
anyones guess. If they are, about half of the community would like to see
fundamental changes in how that same community is represented. Of course
everyone may be tempted to think that the silent majority approves current
status quo by not complaining, but equally so one can think it approves
current criticism by not countering it. The silent majority is like a
portrait that smiles at you from every corner of the room, but to everyone
else at the same time. There is only one way to know what the community
really wants: let's ask them explicitly. Either by survey or plebiscite. It
would strengthen the sense of community if people cannot only express an
opinion (survey) but really exert influence (plebiscite0. Of course the
usual precautions against sock puppetry apply.

I'm in favour of chosen representatives, checks and balances, written
procedures, formally approved strategy. all of this without becoming overly
bureaucratic. Some slowing down might be inevitable but might be a good
thing when broad outlines are to be defined. I'll happily trust the board to
translate these strategical community approved outlines into daily tactical
decisons, and answer the community about them afterwards.

Erik Zachte

On 6/15/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte@infodisiac.com> wrote:
> > On 6/14/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 6/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I agree completely. I resist very strongly any separation of
> foundation
> > > > and community.
> > >
> > > How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united
> > > in practice. I am aware it sounds very inclining to a certain cultural
> > > background, but still daresay this idea itself can be applied to many
> > > cases, specially we need to cooperate with each other.
> > >
> > > Separation itself is nothing wrong. Separation without communication
> > > nor collaboration is bad, or useless at best, assuredly.
> > >
> > > If there is no separation, we require never two words or concepts: in
> > > practice the community isn't involved into a certain matter which the
> > > foundation cares for, and vice versa, I assume. If that sounds too
> > > metaphisical or awkward, we might need another terminology, like
> > distinction, instead of separation.
> >
> > Delphine:
> > Thank you for that. This is exactly what I think we should tend towards.
>
> 'Separated in concept, united in practice'.
> It would have been a great subtitle for an Alexander Dumas novel. ;)
> Aphaia or Delphine can one of you explain what this means?

To make a long story short, as I see it (and as I have made clear in
an earlier post) the Foundation should *not* be ruled byt he
community, no more than the community should be ruled by the
Foundation. Separation as Aphaia put it and to which I agreed means
that those from the community who wish to participate in the
organisation are more than welcome, but that the community does not
have the high hand on things it cannot be held responsible for. I said
it earlier and I'll say it again, a great editor in any of the
Wikimedia projects does *not* make a great board member/commity
member/CEO/accountant, you name it. And the trend as I see it today is
that people in the community judge by what they can see. And if the
community is not involved in Foundation day-to-day business, they only
see how many edits a person has. Not what their real skills are.

Delphine

PS. Erik, if you could *please* stop breaking the threads, it would be
much appreciated.

--
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Delphine Ménard wrote:

>To make a long story short, as I see it (and as I have made clear in
>an earlier post) the Foundation should *not* be ruled byt he
>community, no more than the community should be ruled by the
>Foundation. Separation as Aphaia put it and to which I agreed means
>that those from the community who wish to participate in the
>organisation are more than welcome, but that the community does not
>have the high hand on things it cannot be held responsible for. I said
>it earlier and I'll say it again, a great editor in any of the
>Wikimedia projects does *not* make a great board member/commity
>member/CEO/accountant, you name it. And the trend as I see it today is
>that people in the community judge by what they can see. And if the
>community is not involved in Foundation day-to-day business, they only
>see how many edits a person has. Not what their real skills are.
>
>Delphine
>
>
One thing that democratic institutions do very well with is to get a
diversity of opinions regarding a topic. And to get opinions from new
or shifting viewpoints earlier than most other types of governance units.

The Wikimedia Foundation needs to decide who their "constituants" really
are in this case. In other words, who do the board members really
represent, and what is their purpose in being? And what is the role of
the WMF in regards to the Wikimedia projects?

The concern is that perhaps the board is becomming too insular and not
really paying attention to the participants on the various Wikimedia
projects. My response to the above questions, from my viewpoint, is
that the WMF exists as a support to see that the content on the various
Wikimedia projects is developed in a consistant and organized fashion.
And to maintain the servers and other physical and intangable assetts
that belong to the "community" that is putting all of this together.
They also exist to keep the needs of potential readers of Wikimedia
materials and content in mind, as there certainly exists an audience of
people who read Wikipedia but don't actively work in the creation of
content.

One other constituancy group that is not often mentioned here is also
the MediaWiki software developers. While the software does exist to
serve and help develop the community, there is a somewhat seperate
community of people who are developing the software running all of this,
and that is indeed a seperate "product" that adds to the dynamics of the
WMF, and something that must be managed as well by the WMF board. With
very few exceptions these are all volunteers and are just as valuable as
people writing Wikipedia articles. And requires volunteer management
experience.

The extra dynamic here is that there do exist multiple projects, and in
essense seperate communities, including different groups speaking
multiple languages. fr.wikibooks has a very different group of people
than zh.wikipedia, for example. The WMF needs to cope with the needs
and wants of both groups, and that isn't easy.

What the WMF does not represent is publishers who distribute Wikimedia
project content, ISPs, or corporate sponsors, including grant agencies,
nor any government. It also doesn't represent critics of Wikipedia, nor
people who feel they have been wronged by Wikimedia projects (read John
Siegenthaler here), nor does it represent members of the popular press
even though nobody likes bad publicity.

To this end, the view that there is some sort of seperation from the
community and that there are two distinct entities, the foundation and
the user/contributors is a falsehood. The real truth is that there are
a huge number of people that the WMF represents, and that they can't be
beholden to a single group, such as en.wikipedia. While Wikipedia
certainly is the flagship project, the actual percentage of the total
amount of Wikimedia content that is hosted on en.wikipedia, along with
the number of participants, is a minority. And a shrinking minority at
that. If you believe that decisions reached on the Village Pump of
en.wikipedia represent the whole of Wikimedia projects, you have lost
sight of many other participants that never get to those pages, even on
Wikipedia.

My concern is that some recent actions, notably the checkuser policies
but other issues as well, have ignored these other constituant groups
and may cause some additional problems in the future if they are
ignored. I'm not saying that it is easy to get in touch with such a
diverse group of individuals, but it is worth it to at least try. Board
members that are appointed because of close ties to current board
members or because they are politically connected by whatever term you
want to use to describe the politics, may not have the best interests of
the Wikimedia projects at heart. At the very least there needs to be a
way to get a voice heard, and to have an avenue of appeal if you don't
think something is working out, or that some sort of injustice is
happening.

Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause
problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some
recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.

--
Robert Scott Horning



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On 6/15/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning@netzero.net> wrote:
> Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause
> problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some
> recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.

On my part I haven't heard Delphine taking the community as an enemy
to the foundation, and thank her for her plain but well thought
expantion of my brief comment. Also personally I'm grad to see a
reader who has grasped what I had meant.

Separation, or distinction is itself not evil. To respond Erik Sachte,
I thought the two spontenous individual bodies, never mixed, but
working together, both attempting to listen to the other for further
understanding and cooperation.

--
Aphaia
aka
Kizu Naoko
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com
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On 6/15/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning@netzero.net> wrote:
[snip]
> The concern is that perhaps the board is becomming too insular and not
> really paying attention to the participants on the various Wikimedia
> projects.
[snip]

Can you cite examples?

It is my belief that the board and other people deeply involved in the
foundation are currently mismanaging their time by spending far too
much of it being concerned with the potential reaction of every random
non-productive armchair expert who inevitably crops up to call foul on
any possible idea.

It's a lot easier to speculate on what we could and should do than to
actually do it... and it's a lot easier to naysay than to act. It's
nearly impossible to find a solution to anything complex without at
least a few people writing kiloword screeds on the great evil of the
solution. We must stop allowing ourselves to be victimized by people
whose only skills are complaint and speculation and whose only assets
are time and a desire to hear themselves talk.

[snip]
> Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause
> problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some
> recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
[snip]

Where has the foundation treated the community like the enemy? Which
community? Which comments? What could have been done better?
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On 6/15/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning@netzero.net> wrote:
[snip]

> The Wikimedia Foundation needs to decide who their "constituants" really
> are in this case. In other words, who do the board members really
> represent, and what is their purpose in being? And what is the role of
> the WMF in regards to the Wikimedia projects?
[snip]

> To this end, the view that there is some sort of seperation from the
> community and that there are two distinct entities, the foundation and
> the user/contributors is a falsehood. The real truth is that there are
> a huge number of people that the WMF represents, and that they can't be
> beholden to a single group, such as en.wikipedia. While Wikipedia
> certainly is the flagship project, the actual percentage of the total
> amount of Wikimedia content that is hosted on en.wikipedia, along with
> the number of participants, is a minority. And a shrinking minority at
> that. If you believe that decisions reached on the Village Pump of
> en.wikipedia represent the whole of Wikimedia projects, you have lost
> sight of many other participants that never get to those pages, even on
> Wikipedia.

I suppose this is a general *you*, but I'll answer for myself. As a
French writing to you in English, living in Germany, chair of the
chapters committee, member of three chapters, admin on three projects
(fr, commons and meta), I am conceited enough to believe I am probably
the last person who could be accused of believing that the English
village Pump represents the whole of the Wikimedia projects. No more
than the French, the Wiktionnary village Pump, or the Commons one.

This said, what I understand of your comment, is that the Foundation
is not heeding the people who never express their opinion, may it be
on these lists, on the village pumps, or even on their user pages.
Well, I am not sure I get how the Foundation is always the one
supposed to be fishing for comments. Actually, I believe our board
members/committees have done a pretty damn good job at trying to get
feedback. If they don't get it, there comes a time in life where you
just need to act. So they did.

And here, I mean feedback as a whole, ie. if *the community* wants to
have a say in the appointment of the next accountant, we organize
ourselves and make sure a proposal/counter-proposal is proposed to the
board for review. Right now, all I see are individuals (and I include
myself in those) who are expressing their opinions.

In my opinion, saying that the WMF represents the users *is* the
falsehood. If we kept it on a strict legal level, authors that
contribute their content under the GFDL are *not* assigning rights to
the WMF, or asking the WMF to represent them in any way. Now we might
argue that image (PR) and such are a form of representation. Well, it
is not clear to me, and I believe it is not clear to anyone so far, or
we wouldn't have this conversation.

[snip]

> Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause
> problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some
> recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.

In the end, I find it rather amusing that it is always the *poor
community* (of which I feel a member, just in case that is not clear)
that is being treated as an ennemy. After threads on end on the
subject, it rather looks to me as the Foundation is the one that's
considered the ennemy.

I believe I have always been an advocate of stronger separation (read:
make sure everybody knows exactly what they have to do, what they are
responsible for) AND better communication and collaboration.

It seems to me an easy exercise to talk of *the community* when nobody
seems to have a real understanding of who/what *the community* is. Is
it you? Is it me? Is it us? And if it is us, who is *us*?



Delphine
--
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Delphine Ménard wrote:

>>Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause
>>problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some
>>recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
>>
>>
>
>In the end, I find it rather amusing that it is always the *poor
>community* (of which I feel a member, just in case that is not clear)
>that is being treated as an ennemy. After threads on end on the
>subject, it rather looks to me as the Foundation is the one that's
>considered the ennemy.
>
>I believe I have always been an advocate of stronger separation (read:
>make sure everybody knows exactly what they have to do, what they are
>responsible for) AND better communication and collaboration.
>
>It seems to me an easy exercise to talk of *the community* when nobody
>seems to have a real understanding of who/what *the community* is. Is
>it you? Is it me? Is it us? And if it is us, who is *us*?
>
>
>
>Delphine
>
>
I hope this last comment doesn't get out of context here. I was not
trying to imply that you, Delphine, are considering the group of users
contributing to Wikimedia projects to be the enemy. However, I have
seen this sort of attitude in many different situations, where indeed
this is the case in terms of actions and words spoken by those in
leadership or authority positions. This is the same as police officers
seperating themselves from the citizens they serve, never trusting a
person that comes under their gaze and thinking everybody is a criminal
suspect just waiting to do them in. Or perhaps a fast-food burger
restraunt employee who doesn't reall care about the customers and does
all kinds of things like serve frozen patties and spit into their
drinks. This is a danger in almost any situation and something to
constantly be under guard to watch for and avoid if possible.

As far as who is "The Community", I hope I answered that in my previous
post, and you did respond to that somewhat, Delphine. Thanks. I was
trying to note that there have been some situations where the Village
Pump on en.wikipedia was considered to be the final word, especially for
setting preceedence. While some issues do seem to come up on
en.wikipedia before they hit other projects and languages simply because
of the sheer size of that community, other approachs and solutions to
some of those problems have come up on the other projects (including
other languages) where the solution is quite a bit different in the
environment of those other projects. And bottom-up solutions to many of
the problems for Wikimedia projects can be found, where micromanagement
is not necessary.

Here is a summary of what I consider the "community" to watch for:

1) Editor/Contributors of Wikimedia projects, including all sister
projects and in all languages, and projects like Meta, Commons, etc.
2) Software developers for MediaWiki software and related systems that
help run the interfaces and equipment hosting Wikimedia projects.
3) Volunteer system administrators of the physical equiment (not always
the same as #2, although there is some significnat overlap here)
4) Readers and consumers of information produced by Wikimedia projects

That is a very tall order to fill, to take care of all of these groups,
and in that sense you are correct that the board represents much more
than just the Wikimedia editor/contributors, who are likely to be the
most vocal and active of the above four categories in term of policy
decisions. I've seen Wikipedia quoted in my dead-tree local newspaper
(by the newspaper editor!), so the influence of readers is much more
diverse and widespread than most people even on this list are willing to
admit. Obviously some decisions are going to, by necessity, be made
that one of these groups, the editor/contributors, are not going like or
approve of.

A "fifth" component of the community that may or may not be established
but also watch for is the professional staff that is likely to develop
with the Wikimedia Foundation. There already are some employees of the
WMF, and they will have a very different perspective on how things
should operate as well based on their own experiences and dealings with
the rest of the Wikimedia community. The WMF board is also going to be
made aware of the needs of this group as well, although how much weight
each group is given is going to be up to the temperment of the members
of the WMF board.

I am not implying that the current board is out of touch. Far from it.
Just that this is something to be ever vigiliant about and to remember
and watch for, to see that it doesn't get unbalanced.

--
Robert Scott Horning


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Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Can you cite examples?
>
> It is my belief that the board and other people deeply involved in the
> foundation are currently mismanaging their time by spending far too
> much of it being concerned with the potential reaction of every random
> non-productive armchair expert who inevitably crops up to call foul on
> any possible idea.
>
> It's a lot easier to speculate on what we could and should do than to
> actually do it... and it's a lot easier to naysay than to act. It's
> nearly impossible to find a solution to anything complex without at
> least a few people writing kiloword screeds on the great evil of the
> solution. We must stop allowing ourselves to be victimized by people
> whose only skills are complaint and speculation and whose only assets
> are time and a desire to hear themselves talk.
>
Can you cite examples?

Many of the people complaining on this list about board management are
precisely the same people who have been actually doing things to advance
our projects. Erik Moeller is to a large extent responsible for the
existence and organization of both Wikinews and the Wikimedia Commons.
Tim Starling is one of the major MediaWiki developers. And so on.

Does your comment have any substance besides a gratuitous and unfounded
personal attack on people you happen to disagree with?

-Mark

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Robert Scott Horning wrote:

>Delphine Ménard wrote:
>
>
>
>>To make a long story short, as I see it (and as I have made clear in
>>an earlier post) the Foundation should *not* be ruled byt he
>>community, no more than the community should be ruled by the
>>Foundation. Separation as Aphaia put it and to which I agreed means
>>that those from the community who wish to participate in the
>>organisation are more than welcome, but that the community does not
>>have the high hand on things it cannot be held responsible for. I said
>>it earlier and I'll say it again, a great editor in any of the
>>Wikimedia projects does *not* make a great board member/commity
>>member/CEO/accountant, you name it. And the trend as I see it today is
>>that people in the community judge by what they can see. And if the
>>community is not involved in Foundation day-to-day business, they only
>>see how many edits a person has. Not what their real skills are.
>>
>>Delphine
>>
>>
>>
>>
>One thing that democratic institutions do very well with is to get a
>diversity of opinions regarding a topic. And to get opinions from new
>or shifting viewpoints earlier than most other types of governance units.
>
>The Wikimedia Foundation needs to decide who their "constituants" really
>are in this case. In other words, who do the board members really
>represent, and what is their purpose in being? And what is the role of
>the WMF in regards to the Wikimedia projects?
>
>The concern is that perhaps the board is becomming too insular and not
>really paying attention to the participants on the various Wikimedia
>projects. My response to the above questions, from my viewpoint, is
>that the WMF exists as a support to see that the content on the various
>Wikimedia projects is developed in a consistant and organized fashion.
> And to maintain the servers and other physical and intangable assetts
>that belong to the "community" that is putting all of this together.
> They also exist to keep the needs of potential readers of Wikimedia
>materials and content in mind, as there certainly exists an audience of
>people who read Wikipedia but don't actively work in the creation of
>content.
>
>One other constituancy group that is not often mentioned here is also
>the MediaWiki software developers. While the software does exist to
>serve and help develop the community, there is a somewhat seperate
>community of people who are developing the software running all of this,
>and that is indeed a seperate "product" that adds to the dynamics of the
>WMF, and something that must be managed as well by the WMF board. With
>very few exceptions these are all volunteers and are just as valuable as
>people writing Wikipedia articles. And requires volunteer management
>experience.
>
>The extra dynamic here is that there do exist multiple projects, and in
>essense seperate communities, including different groups speaking
>multiple languages. fr.wikibooks has a very different group of people
>than zh.wikipedia, for example. The WMF needs to cope with the needs
>and wants of both groups, and that isn't easy.
>
>What the WMF does not represent is publishers who distribute Wikimedia
>project content, ISPs, or corporate sponsors, including grant agencies,
>nor any government. It also doesn't represent critics of Wikipedia, nor
>people who feel they have been wronged by Wikimedia projects (read John
>Siegenthaler here), nor does it represent members of the popular press
>even though nobody likes bad publicity.
>
>To this end, the view that there is some sort of seperation from the
>community and that there are two distinct entities, the foundation and
>the user/contributors is a falsehood. The real truth is that there are
>a huge number of people that the WMF represents, and that they can't be
>beholden to a single group, such as en.wikipedia. While Wikipedia
>certainly is the flagship project, the actual percentage of the total
>amount of Wikimedia content that is hosted on en.wikipedia, along with
>the number of participants, is a minority. And a shrinking minority at
>that. If you believe that decisions reached on the Village Pump of
>en.wikipedia represent the whole of Wikimedia projects, you have lost
>sight of many other participants that never get to those pages, even on
>Wikipedia.
>
>My concern is that some recent actions, notably the checkuser policies
>but other issues as well, have ignored these other constituant groups
>and may cause some additional problems in the future if they are
>ignored. I'm not saying that it is easy to get in touch with such a
>diverse group of individuals, but it is worth it to at least try. Board
>members that are appointed because of close ties to current board
>members or because they are politically connected by whatever term you
>want to use to describe the politics, may not have the best interests of
>the Wikimedia projects at heart. At the very least there needs to be a
>way to get a voice heard, and to have an avenue of appeal if you don't
>think something is working out, or that some sort of injustice is
>happening.
>
>Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause
>problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some
>recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
>
>
>

Many of the excellent points raised above by Roberth are often addressed
in a business plan or operations plans. Most not small U.S. business
entities have an annual update process whereby these plans are reviewed,
adjusted, modifed to reflect the organizations current intentions. The
process is used to update and propagate critical information between all
levels and often even mere stakeholders. The plans are typically not
intended as straightjackets rather they are a snapshot at a moment in
time of the best summary of itself the organization can provide to all
its diverse elements. Another similar tool is a stakeholders report
that summarizes past periods performance compared to the planned
performance and analyzes causes or sources of any major deviation and
appropriate adjustments if any.

Does such a beast exist somewhere publicly available?

regards,
lazyquasar

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Robert Scott Horning wrote:

>Delphine Ménard wrote:
>
>
>
Great work both of you!

Some really good analysis of constituent groups. We (anybody bored and
willing to volunteer if they thought it might get used or be valuable
sometime somewhere) could probably cut and pasted and have an entire
section of a business operations plan or marketing analaysis a quarter
to half finished.

Anybody know if the new Interim Director is bringing his own ops plan or
likes to develop his own in private?

Last time I initiated business planning at meta I was designated a troll
so expect no dangerous unilateral initiative from me.

I will merely keep this as a reference or maybe use some of it for a
lession plan or two at Wikiversity.

Thanks folks!

regards,
lazyquasar

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On 6/14/06, Aphaia <aphaia@gmail.com> wrote:

> How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united
> in practice.

I see it the other way around. For me, the key concept that has
enabled the success of Wikipedia is "within our goal (to create an
encyclopedia), maximize participation, transparency and
accountability". This means that we accept certain control mechanisms,
such as page protection and the notion of admins, as necessary to
protect the encyclopedia, at least until better solutions are found.

I believe Wikimedia would be well served by following the same
_principle_, using different _practices_ which are appropriate for an
organization (taking into account, for instance, the legal
requirements and risks an organization faces; certain tasks require
certain minimum qualifications, etc.). I also view this, in both
cases, as a never-ending _process_, rather than a permanent state. If
either Wikipedia or Wikimedia become static in their practices, it is
time to think about replacing them.

This same view is applicable to the other projects: what is an
appropriate practice for Wikipedia is not necessarily so for Wikinews
or Wiktionary. Again, within each project's defined mission, we should
seek to optimize the above key variables. This is what I call the
"wiki philosophy", and it is independent from any particular
implementation or scenario. This philsophy, I feel, is universal.

Erik
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Erik Moeller wrote:

>On 6/14/06, Aphaia <aphaia@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united
>>in practice.
>>
>>
>
>I see it the other way around. For me, the key concept that has
>enabled the success of Wikipedia is "within our goal (to create an
>encyclopedia), maximize participation, transparency and
>accountability". This means that we accept certain control mechanisms,
>such as page protection and the notion of admins, as necessary to
>protect the encyclopedia, at least until better solutions are found.
>
>I believe Wikimedia would be well served by following the same
>_principle_, using different _practices_ which are appropriate for an
>organization (taking into account, for instance, the legal
>requirements and risks an organization faces; certain tasks require
>certain minimum qualifications, etc.). I also view this, in both
>cases, as a never-ending _process_, rather than a permanent state. If
>either Wikipedia or Wikimedia become static in their practices, it is
>time to think about replacing them.
>
>This same view is applicable to the other projects: what is an
>appropriate practice for Wikipedia is not necessarily so for Wikinews
>or Wiktionary. Again, within each project's defined mission, we should
>seek to optimize the above key variables. This is what I call the
>"wiki philosophy", and it is independent from any particular
>implementation or scenario. This philsophy, I feel, is universal.
>
I substantially agree, and would put a handful of fundamental principles
well above practice or process. Those principles carry over to other
projects. The establishment of Wiktionary was a natural evolution from
the semi-fundamental principle that Wikipedia is not a dictionary. That
established a boundary for the new project without putting into doubt
any of Wikipedia's other principles.

Stasis is a high level violation of the principle of non-ownership. We
tell would-be editors that their work may be edited mercilessly, and
proceed with such edits. It's easier to do when there is so little at
stake, as in the case of a single article. The assets needed to run
Wikimedia are no longer insignificant. Things have gone well beyond a
single server in San Diego. With that growth has come the motherly
perception that the assets need to be protected, and that a socio-legal
framework needs to be built in support of that framework. Security begs
for static practices.

Mothers protect their children; they do not own them. There's a price
paid from the soul when the mother has to stand her neatly cleaned-up
offspring in front of the nice corporation hoping that a little candy
will trickle down.

Democratic communities are about empowerment. That empowerment comes
from a belief in one's own self. At a governmental level it does not
happen simply from the actions of an invader who makes pompous promises
about binging democracy. Belief in oneself is always more difficult in
societies where the citizens are schooled into compliance from an early
age. I can't think of a single society where that does not happen.

It's hard to identify the tipping point where the participatory
community moves over to become the protected community.

Maybe we just need more forks. Thus far we have had mirrors, but
imagine if one or more of those mirrors decided that from some point in
time it would no longer copy Wikipedia content, but would allow its
users to edit directly on that site. The effect on subjects that are
prone to NPOV battles could be interesting. Probably the combined
result of all such edits might be even more neutral. Neutralizing the
effects of ownership could be even more wiki.

Ec

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