User talk:Xiong
Talk to me! :)
- 今日ã¯- This is 日本語 for Good day. Hi! So, I'm here.--Jondel 04:34, 15 Apr 2005 (CDT)
Speaking of chewing on things, I've left something for you at Charter/General. And now I'm going to bed. :-) JRM 18:13, 16 Apr 2005 (CDT)
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, 'See, this is new'? It has already been, in the ages before us." -- Ecclesiastes, 1:9-10
Read the MeatBall:MeatballWiki.
There is also some good material on the meta.
UninvitedCompany 20:05, 16 Apr 2005 (CDT)
String-pulling
Is Jimbo's power truly unlimited? Theoretically, yes. In practice, of course, Jimbo will not be interested in playing God over the wiki, because this would destroy the encyclopedia he believes in. We don't have to fear that the developers or the board will actually bypass the community—they'd kill the goose laying the golden eggs The only point is that they could. The developers ultimately control all access to the database; the foundation (and by extension the board) ultimately controls the physical resources of the project. Though Wikipedia's independence is continuously increased, the buck must always stop somewhere, and even a well-meaning group of professionals have the potential to make catastrophic decisions.
The only loophole is the possibility of forking. If something truly disastrous happened to Wikipedia, then we could simply set up a new one, using the content of the old one, which can never be withheld. Since forking is a very expensive operation (in all ways imaginable) the event sparking it needs to be so serious that it a significant part of the community wants to put the effort into a fork. It's happened in the beginning with the Spanish Wikipedia, some of whose contributors didn't agree with the then-current power structure, but this was when there was little to fork (and efforts are still underway to undo it). The effort needed to make a fork of the English Wikipedia successful would be Herculean, and the developers and the board therefore have a lot of leeway to do considerable damage to Wikipedia if they insisted on bypassing the community on something—which, of course, they don't, as I explained above. JRM 04:53, 17 Apr 2005 (CDT)
