Charter/Preamble

Wikipedia is not one big happy family. Wikipedia was one big happy family -- oh, yeah, some ruffhousing now and then, but not what it is now. Wikipedia is no longer even a small town. We do not know everyone we meet. Wikipedia is a small city, and still growing [1]. We now spend more time and energy dealing with growing pains than with useful content, and this imbalance is getting worse.

The Wikipedian Community began with ideals -- noble ideals, excellent ideals. But some of these ideals are demanding for any large community. Good outweighs bad in the absence of structure only as long as the good are able to watch the bad. We can no longer resist the need to make some basic changes to our most cherished beliefs. We have many choices in how we do this, but no choice at all in whether we can retain, unchanged, what we had before. We cannot.

If we resist change, then social forces will destroy our ideals in fact, even as they continue to give them lip service. If we abandon our duty to craft the future, it will be crafted for us by others.

Besides our social problems, we also find ourselves beset by technical difficulties. These are relatively minor, but are related to our social problems, and must also be addressed.

We cannot alter human nature without limit. We cannot engineer human group dynamics as easily as server networks. We must take into account immutable human nature, choose our direction for the future, and embrace it.