Everybody’s reaction to Wikipedia has gotten warmer over time, as Wikipedia’s earned credibility Options

[thekohser]

Sue Gardner is kicking her fanaticism into high gear.

[The Joy]

* Work to create a favourable public image for the movement
* Support participants and help recruit new participants
* Help with effective communications
* Support revenue-generating activities
* Build and sustain participant morale
* Build and support leaders
* Encourage internal solidarity: support kindness, understanding, generosity and a sense of common purpose
* Encourage external solidarity: support the development of common cause between the movement and its potential allies and partners
* Support movement events and projects.

[thekohser]

* Work to create a favourable public image for the movement
* Support participants and help recruit new participants
* Help with effective communications
* Support revenue-generating activities
* Build and sustain participant morale
* Build and support leaders
* Encourage internal solidarity: support kindness, understanding, generosity and a sense of common purpose
* Encourage external solidarity: support the development of common cause between the movement and its potential allies and partners
* Support movement events and projects.

Your post was very inspiring, The Joy. In fact, it motivated a news commentary about the matter.

[Larry Sanger]

I just noticed this. My response to Sue (we'll see if she posts it):

Sue,

I’m responding both to your general suggestion that Wikipedians come together and stop criticizing their leaders, and to this comment: “We subject each other to relentless scrutiny — criticizing our own leaders and supporters and activities, monitoring, speculating, worrying, and poking and prodding each other. All, frequently, in public. I’ve been trying to figure out why we’re like this.”

The reason, of course, is that Wikipedia’s policymaking de facto takes the form of random conversation, ill-managed straw polls, and any “consensus” that results (or whatever someone can pass off as such). The conversation is subject to a zillion vague, easily manipulable rules. In such a governance situation, the only way to get your agenda passed is by intimidation, shouting down the opposition, etc.–in short, it’s mob rule. You shouldn’t be too surprised if what has been set up and perpetuated as a mob acts like a mob.

Your proposal, that there be less criticism of community leaders, will not be successful unless you change the basic constraints of the community. It sounds like a hint that people simply knuckle under to the leaders of the mob. Not only is that actually offensive to democratic sensibilities, it couldn’t possibly work.

The alternative–which won’t make things radically more polite, but maybe a little–is to start an actual legislative body, constrained by a community charter. Forcefully assert the fundamental injustice of the current policymaking/governance scheme, throw off your community’s ridiculous notions of a “benevolent monarch” and impossible “consensus,” and insist that there be a consitutional convention in which the rules governing policymaking are hammered out. Moreover, to avoid the fate of all one-party state, invite the formation of competing parties.

Then let constitutional democracy work its magic. The world’s knowledge deserves nothing less. Otherwise you are left with “the slum of all human knowledge,” I’m afraid.

–Larry