[ox-en] Re: What's wrong with powerful maintainers?
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:23:56 +0200
Hi Michel, alejo, all!
Yesterday Michel Bauwens wrote:
You ask for an example. My own conviction is, but it is different, is that
the editors in Wikipedia have developed a dysfunctional form of governance,
whereby the less knowledgeable editors crowd out more knowledgeable article
writers, and function as a clique ..
I agree that the Wikipedia maintenance is in a deep crisis. alejo's
example is probably only one of many. It shows that the current
Wikipedia maintenance scares away people.
Well, I think an important question which needs considerations are the
goals of a project. If you read alejo's example then you can see that
he has a rather clear opinion of what the goal of Wikipedia is.
Without taking sides you could state that the opinion of the Wikipedia
maintainers obviously differs from alejo's opinion. This would at the
very least mean that the Wikipedia maintainers lack to describe the
goals of the projects clearly so everyone who considers contributing
knows what s/he does. Generally lack of transparency seems to be one
of the major problems.
If the opinion's like alejo's are frequent then you should see a fork
happen. In fact the citizendium [1]_ project is such a fork which
clearly states a goal and a different mode of operation. Other forks
are of course thinkable.
.. [1] I think the URL is http://www.citizendium.org/ but being
offline at the moment I can't check this.
However this does not seem to be the case in free software as far as I know,
where developers seem more than happy with the maintainer system.
There are also maintenance crisises in Free Software projects of
course. One which comes to mind immediately is the crisis in the XFree
project which at some point ended in a major - and successful - fork
with many contributors moving to the parallel - but dormant IIRC -
X.org project. IIRC the official reason was a change in the license
but I think I heard of other maintenance problems before. Anybody with
a better knowledge of what happened correct me please.
Another maintenance crisis took place when the GCC project finally
forked successfully. However, they joined again at some point.
The question is: why the difference, why is this so?
At this point I usually say: Software has a hard criterion beyond
human opinions: It runs or not. That makes some things easier and in
Wikipedia you do not have these hard criteria.
But on second thought I think this is too short. A software project
has also lots of degrees of freedom and only some of the possible
paths end up in non-running code. A software expert can probably argue
about aesthetics in a software but this is a soft a criterion as
criteria for Wikipedia.
Well, in the end I think I do not have a good explanation. However, it
is also questionable to compare lots of Free Software projects with
one encyclopedia project.
Yesterday alejo duque wrote:
if you compare backgrounds and the generational gap between FLOSS
developers and wikipedia editors you will get a clear reason for why
such difference...
Can you give more details in what you are thinking about?
Grüße
Stefan
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