Bitcoin Wiki talk:Governance

A personal request - please discuss this over at this bitcointalk thread instead of over here. I just hate mediawiki discussions, and I still haven't figured out how to get email alerts when someone replies to me, so I'll probably never see your message if you add it here, as opposed to bitcointalk.

Ripper234 (talk) 01:35, 25 March 2013 (GMT)

As I explained on the Bitcoin talk thread, I don't think this page is a good idea. --Gmaxwell (talk) 20:06, 29 March 2013 (GMT)

Gmaxwell, I have replied to your bitcointalk post a while back. I do believe that some core rules are required ... hopefully we never need to enforce them. Do you disagree with any of the rules proposed here? (Please take the answer to the bitcointalk thread). Ripper234 (talk) 04:14, 4 April 2013 (GMT)

I edited a bit, previously, to make it less disagreeable... Although I see that while you didn't bother proposing any further edits for two weeks you went and made some substantial rewrites just moments you edited the page to declare it official policy. This is the antithesis of appropriate Wiki governance.

…but what I disagree with more are a couple of unwritten things that couldn't really be resolved with editing:

• We have someone who has never substantially contributed to this wiki made an admin imposing a unilateral rule list as an official policy
  • Who is so disinterested in the Wiki that he even directs comments on the rules to an external forum.
• Rules which were obviously written for the purpose of a personal editing dispute with a single contributor (which the rules actually call out as an example, almost as a bill of attainder; it had been edited out— but you restored it)
• Rules which will apparently not be enforced on other contributors

I note that you've never reached out to me for help getting a handle on issues as I offered in the forum thread.

It all just seems like really bad mojo to me, perhaps not likely to cause grave harm but also not the sort of thing needed to help a nascent wiki grow. We should have a community here collaborating as a primary norm enforcement mechanism. I have never seen a wiki gain large public activity when rules came before community enforcement. You're obviously not going to do all the work of making this Wiki useful yourself— none of us will— but something about heavy handed governance seems to make people look at the wiki as someone elses problem rather than a personal responsibility.--Gmaxwell (talk) 20:39, 14 April 2013 (GMT)

I agree with gmaxwell here. I am going to edit the page to make it more friendly, and then let's just have a friendly talk about it and let things percolate. Nanotube (talk) 13:07, 28 April 2013 (GMT)