Board Thread:Site Discussions/@comment-3416945-20160829051027/@comment-167456-20160829192519

Ultrasonic9000 wrote: Supermorff wrote: From what I can tell, you have identified a problem that currently exists on SNN. The problem is that the community is insufficiently engaged with the management of the wiki for it to run smoothly. Your solution is to remove the need for community engagement.

What is your ultimate goal? Do you foresee greater community engagement in future? If so, do you plan to reverse this decision when it happens? Or do you think that community engagement will remain at roughly the same low level in future? Do you want community engagement to be higher, and if so do you have plans to encourage that?

If you decide to make a change like this (and far be it from me to dissuade you since I am one of the least active users here), then my recommended solution would be to reduce the need for community engagement rather than eliminating it altogether. Keep the structures that facilitate it in place. Perhaps fewer users need to give their support for a particular motion to pass (10 or 5 users need to vote on bureaucrats, for instance). Perhaps you can even shift discussions to be more of an opportunity for people to disagree, and assume lack of engagement is implicit endorsement/willingness. But as soon as you put all of the authority in the hands of a very small elite and remove opportunity for regular users to have their say, community engagement will probably drop further because users won't feel that their opinions matter. I had not thought of that. That makes sense. Maybe that is not so good an idea after all.

By all means, do something. A problem has been identified and steps should be taken to fix it. But if the goal is to bring community engagement back up to a level it was at previously, then your solution should encourage more community engagement, not less.