Task forces burned out IMHO

Well, an approach of "Strategy has to be continuous improvement. Little steps, solving issues (maybe small ones, but continuously) that suck." may solve some of the problems, but certainly not all of them, and not the big problems [I remember when I encountered Wikipedia of trying to use small, non-confrontational steps, injecting dry facts, hoping that this would sooner or later help turn matters for the better. This met with a concerted effort along the lines of "We are not going to allow any fact into Wikipedia, as this may hinder our ability to write fiction" and matters are just as bad now as they were five years ago, with "Truth, not Verifiability" going as strong as ever]. In that light I recommend reading the interview on Ubuntu: a structured approach is a requirement if the end result is supposed to actually work.

"One of the problems that was seen at UDS, and one that Wikimedia might face, is that volunteers don’t really care about strategy. They want to work on something interesting. They want to be rewarded. They want to feel engaged. Generally, most people who want to be involved with Wikimedia probably don’t want to be involved with strategy."

Trusting in a magic process, with results arising spontaneously out of volunteers, may lead nowhere, or somewhere that you did not want to be.

As to these Task Groups, it is true that they served as a testbed for LiquidThreads (showing this to be abysmal failure; a good illustration of what happens if you allow a software engineer a free hand: trouble and nothing but trouble), but otherwise I suppose it worked as well as might be expected, that is, not as well as might be hoped, but not as bad as might be feared. The results are modest (the recommendation to adopt a Brand Statement looks to me to be the most promising by far, although it is sure to meet with opposition from the many users who see Wikipedia as the platform for Their Very Own Truth). For most recommendations the success or failure will depend very much on the implementation (they could well boomerang and make matters worse). I am not necessarily hopeful about the eventual net effect of these Task Groups, but I certainly would not preclude that some good may come out of them. - Brya 05:35, 6 February 2010 (UTC)