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QUOTE
* 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.
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QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 4th August 2010, 5:40pm)
QUOTE
* 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.
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QUOTE(WikiWatch @ Wed 4th August 2010, 2:25am)
QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 4th August 2010, 5:40pm)
QUOTE
* 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.
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QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 4th August 2010, 3:40am)
QUOTE
* 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.
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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.â€
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.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Wed 4th August 2010, 10:21am)
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.
Well close. There already is an entity that is suppose to make important decisions about the project by discussion, planning and voting on binding decisions...the WMF Board of Trustees. Maybe someday they will transcend the endless Usenet-like recreation of all institutions and just get normal for a change. Of course the current composition of the board is too narrowly Wikipedian and not up to the task but at the end of the day that is where the change needs to come from.
Until then maybe a voting system utilizing base 7 and approved by a shaman from the amazonian rainforest?
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Here is what I submitted to Sue's blog...
"You may resist the invasion of armies, but you can't resist the invasion of ideas." —Victor Hugo
21st Century concepts of good governance comprise an idea whose time has come.
Sue, the Wikimedia Foundation has an unexploited and undeveloped opportunity to play a leadership role in promoting the highest ideals expressed in the WMF Mission Statement and Values Statement, of empowering and engaging scholars around the world to collect and develop high quality educational content for other students, educators, and scholars around the world.
The sum of all human knowledge includes some 4000 years of political history that we may call the Advance of Civilization.
Among those advances are fundamental concepts of Due Process, Civil Rights, Equal Protection, and Evidence-Based Judgments that represent the hardest fought gains in all of human history. Sue, I would like to see you and others in leadership positions at the Wikimedia Foundation embrace and demonstrate modern 21st Century concepts of good governance, beginning with a sincere and whole-hearted demonstration of the most fundamental and basic ideas of good government and managerial ethics.
A few years ago, Lar, Sam Korn, and others pointed out that Wikipedia does not do Due Process, which is why the oftimes erratic process of conflict resolution has been a perennial source of embarrasingly absurd political drama that frequently reprises some of the most famous episodes in the annals of human history.
It does not behoove the Foundation or its public projects to regress to atrociously anachronistic and totemic tribal practices that predate the advent of the Rule of Law.
The time has come, Sue, to evolve to 21st Century notions of good government, managerial ethics, and best practices for a donor-funded online educational outreach program.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Wed 4th August 2010, 10:18pm)
Sue has released from moderation my post (reproduced above) as well as one from Somey.
Dang, I was really hoping she would delete that one, so I could add it to me list of rejected WP'er blog comments... (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)
Admittedly, I wasn't being entirely honest either about the reason(s) Wikipedians don't generally identify themselves, despite the fact that they're supposed to be doing "charity work." Since I've never created a WP account myself, I keep forgetting that there's a paragraph or two on the "Make an account" page telling new users that it's not always a good idea to use their real names, or some such thing. That's still there, right? So they're basically just following instructions.
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 4th August 2010, 11:25am)
QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 4th August 2010, 3:40am)
QUOTE
* 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.
Well, thank you and you're welcome! I was looking for Stalin presiding over a Soviet march or even Hitler presiding over a Nazi parade. But I couldn't find a good one with Stalin, and, as for Hitler, I'd hate to take away Mr. Godwin's attention from the FBI's seal.
Like many people who write about Wikipedia from remote observation platforms, you appear to have very little acquaintance with the realities in the trenches. A very large number of people who criticize Wikipedia — voices you dismiss as “detractors†— do at least have the experience of those realities to inform their criticisms. They will neither be impressed by the devices of glowing rhetoric nor induced by yet another call to “circle the wagons†to ignore what they know of the atrocities in those trenches.
Now, I doubt if there’s any way you can go from Wiki-Princess to Wiki-Pauper and slum about incognito on the streets of your realm without very quickly being recognized — nor can I ethically wish that experience on anyone — but you might be able to bring your level of empirical information up to par by participating in The Wikipedia Review. Because it samples the same population as Wikipedia itself it can be a wild and woolly arena at times, but there are at least a few moderators of moderate good sense who try to maintain isolated pockets of decorum. So I leave that invitation open to you.
Like many people who write about Wikipedia from remote observation platforms, you appear to have very little acquaintance with the realities in the trenches. A very large number of people who criticize Wikipedia — voices you dismiss as “detractors†— do at least have the experience of those realities to inform their criticisms. They will neither be impressed by the devices of glowing rhetoric nor induced by yet another call to “circle the wagons†to ignore what they know of the atrocities in those trenches.
Now, I doubt if there’s any way you can go from Wiki-Princess to Wiki-Pauper and slum about incognito on the streets of your realm without very quickly being recognized — nor can I ethically wish that experience on anyone — but you might be able to bring your level of empirical information up to par by participating in The Wikipedia Review. Because it samples the same population as Wikipedia itself it can be a wild and woolly arena at times, but there are at least a few moderators of moderate good sense who try to maintain isolated pockets of decorum. So I leave that invitation open to you.
Sincerely,
Jon Awbrey
“Open†is just another word for take a number and go to hell …
My comment was tagged as â„– 21. It's been 24 hours and I see that the comment tagged â„– 22 has already been posted — doing the math, that's 6 comments posted out of 22 or more — you have to suspect that the other 16 or more were either all ads for \/|/-\â…â„ž/-\ or regarded by Ms. Gardner as equally valuable to “Da Causeâ€.
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Everybody’s reaction to Wikipedia has gotten warmer over time, as Wikipedia’s earned credibility
