Looking ahead to recommendations: who has credibility/authority to move them forward?
Sue, it's funny that the quality task force become very focused on community health, because that very much applies to us.
I've kind of had a sense that we wouldn't be able to actually make policy for the community. We wouldn't have the legitimacy... and even if we could make a persuasive case to the board, I'm sure they'd ask if they even have the legitimacy on such a people-driven community.
But the good news is that we've identified seven areas for recommendations, and most of them avoid direct changes to policy:
- Rewards
- Social networking features
- Improved usability (and tutorials/wizards?)
- Improved governance
- Improved dispute resolution and decision making
- Policy
- help and documentation
The first three do not get directly involved in community controversies. They just make it more rewarding, fun, and easy to get work done, all of which promote community health. Help and documentation is pretty uncontroversial, and could easily be sponsored by the board (if we thought it was one of our top four recommendations, which I don't think it is). And when I look at issues of governance and decision making, I would look at doing exactly what you just said we should do: create a system where Wikipedians can mandate their own changes, instead of forcing changes upon them.
The only area of recommendation that could lead to actual policy changes is #6: policy. And I was already lukewarm towards that. The Ortega study has suggested that policy isn't having much of an impact, and I've looked at a few case studies to find that a lot of hostility and closed-mindedness comes from individual editors rather than broad policies. If you're right that the board couldn't do anything about policy except set soft targets, then I'd be ready to cross "policy" off the list. It would make picking our four areas of concentration much easier.
We should probably have a discussion about which areas of recommendation to pursue anyway. I think we're doing that this Thursday.
Randomran - these are a good list of areas to work on. I would add one category that may overlap with #1,4,5 somewhat but has a slightly different orientation that being small efforts within the community of contributors to create new norms of engagement. Here is the link to a post I just added to the quality TF (which as you note is wrestling with some of the same questions) t link:Thread:Talk:Task force/Improve Wikipedia's Quality Task Force/Communal enabling of quality/BarryN
--BarryN 18:23, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
Barry, I think that's an interesting idea. I figured that kind of thing would come up in "improved decision making and dispute resolution" -- tools like facilitation, and new guidelines that prevent it from just turning into "last person standing wins".
I think even FloNight wanted to move away from talking about "governance" and talking more about "organizational structure", so I think that what you're talking about could come up there.
Good to know you're seeing some of the same things. Hopefully through dialog we can make these ideas more feasible and effective.