The net is doing OK here on the right coast this morning so far, though Amazon is running a bit slower than usual.
But my data point probably isn't that solid as I'm trying to dump Verizon for Speakeasy for bandwidth and service related issues.
I lasted about 3 months on Wikipedia. In my time there I got into about a dozen fights with administrators, mostly about the exercise of administrator fiat in inappropriate contexts (where rule by consensus was formulating, or not formulating, but where that should have been left well enough alone). I eventually left because I found that Wikipedians' ideas of what consensus is (as in consensus rule) were unsalvageably misconstrued to be equivalent to supermajority. Being a child of the Society of Friends, I know in my bones that this is not the case, and repeatedly running up against that misunderstanding was really ruining my year.
So I left. I don't know if there's a good way to fix the problem. I suspect not, since most folks are kind of uncomfortable with consensus decision-making and even though they give a lot of lip service to the goal of egalitarian consensus-based rule, they're really more comfortable with a hierarchical system where folks who want and have power make binding unilateral decisions instead.
I don't think that basic social issue will really ever be fixed there. Besides, the internet is an uncommonly difficult place to achieve consensus in gigantic organizations anyway.
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| 2007 | 1 |
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