Message: 2 Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 04:00:56 +0100 From: Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Destructionism To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: AANLkTikV1_XHAbsm+HzezF=D9zp6L6RndqvvTZd47CCd@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
It seems to me that the isms we get are to do with the relatively poor decision making process we have. I think the current 'judicial' system involve admins is rather broken.
The problem is that the RFCs/AFDs etc are too prone to vote stuffing of one form or another, the most benign source of which is probably 'noticeboards', whereas the most malign is presumably sockpuppets or even paid stooges.
In theory admins should sort most of these problems out, as they're supposed to follow the policies, rather than treat it as a vote, but because the admins are voted in/out via a popularity contest they usually go with the popularist vote.
Perhaps the wikipedia would do much better to go with a random jury selection process to make the actual decision, and then have an admin action it.
There would be downsides but I would tend to think that that would probably be more normative to what the reader expects when they read the article.
-- -Ian Woollard
There are many criticisms I would and have made of RFA, but it isn't a popularity contest, though it can be an unpopularity contest as the 70-75% threshold for success means that only a relatively small number of foes are needed to derail an RFA. And admins are definitely not voted out by a popularity contest, though replacing Arbcom with some sort of lynch mob does get unsuccessfully proposed every few months.
Having a jury system instead of anyone who cares enough about that article or deletions in general would be a tad unwiki, and I suspect only the extremists on both sides would willingly serve on such juries in any number. Even then I doubt you would get large enough numbers to replicate AFD.
As for sockpuppetry, traditionally Wikipedia has been very relaxed about this. It would be technically feasible to be much more rigorous, we might need to invest a little in software and hardware - we'd certainly need to amend our privacy policies both to keep data on the IPs used by logged in editors for much longer, and to go on fishing trips. But if we wanted to we could have software that notified the checkusers whenever two accounts that sometimes used the same IP voted in the same AFD, and I suspect we could permanently store IP and editing pattern info on serious miscreants so that the system could warn checkusers of their possible return. We'd certainly need to allow for more false positives, but I suspect I'm not the only Wikipedian who would welcome a somewhat beefed up approach to sockpuppetry.
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