QUOTE(Moulton @ Fri 28th May 2010, 1:39pm)
My experience with people in power, who reject the notion of a community-wide social contract, is that they try to negotiate private backroom deals (like
this one) which they can then misrepresent, abrogate, or otherwise weasel out of.
Well, power corrupts. Yet even in well-structured communities, natural oligarchies develop that cause some level of corruption. (It's corruption when individual interest trumps social interest; and the most subtle and difficult to prevent corruption is where the oligarchy sees its own interests as being the social interest.)
To be successful, long-term, without this kind of corruption taking over, I only know of one strategy that's been seen to work: massive decentralization with central coordination necessarily dependent upon continued voluntary cooperation. Most people probably believe that it's impossible. It isn't.
However, the one major example of maintained success was unique in that one of the founders got the necessity, and incorporated safeguards into the central structure. To some extent that was forced, to try to get everyone on the same page with a powerful central structure would have been like herding cats, it would, all by itself, have torn the organization apart.
This was Alcoholics Anonymous, and the founder in question was Bill Wilson.
QUOTE(Moulton @ Fri 28th May 2010, 2:01pm)
QUOTE(Abd @ Fri 28th May 2010, 1:50pm)
And note that when someone is very bright and sees a lot that others don't see, a sober commentary can look like ranting and raving!
As near as I can tell, Wikipedians are allergic to sober commentary. Then again, then don't like song parodies either.
How many Wikipedians are there, anyway, and how is it that you can say something sensible about "most" of them?
Indeed, my basic observation about Wikipedia, in 2007, was that there was no means of knowing what "most Wikipedians" think. We only know, and that only to a degree, what the active core thinks. There would be a way to gather, at least with a kind of anticipatory approximation, this. It would be efficient.
But it scares the shit out of the active core.
Meanwhile, the activity of that core has been driving away massive chunks of the larger user base, doing damage that may be impossible to undo. So the core is shooting itself in the foot, making the project more and more difficult to maintain.
Another way to put this is that a very high percentage of the sane users have left, leaving behind a warped sample. Some remain who are sane, to some degree (how do you feel, Lar?), but it becomes increasingly difficult for them. Progess is made in one area, while another is backsliding....