Ed Poor wrote: I agree. Here's my solution: (1) Require people to register, providing a verifiable email address that is not yahoo or hotmail, as a precondition for contributing. (Alternately, restrict the NUMBER of contributions that a non-registered individual can contribute within a 24-hour period.) (2) Unambiguously authorize sysops to take immediate, unilateral action against egregious abusers (with clear definitions of "egregious abuse"). (3) Use mediation/arbitration as both an appeals process for users who feel that have been wrongfully banned, and as a method of dealing with disputes and allegations of abuse that don't meet the standard of "egregious abuse." Finally, I think we should think seriously about the "democracy" part of "WikiDemocracy." Democracy is a system of governance. It is not anarchy. There are rules and rulers. It's a better system generally than dictatorship, but it isn't simply laissez-faire. I've been doing a bit of experimentation lately with using wikis to facilitate decision-making within some nonprofit organizations in which I am active. In that context, I've come to the conclusion that wikis should be used primarily for facilitation of the process rather than for decision-making per se. For example, I sit on a committee that makes decisions about lending policy and loans to low-income communities in Nicaragua. We're going to try to use a wiki as an way to formulate and revise proposals, but once a proposal has been formulated, we'll still need to the committee to vote up or down on it in the tradition one person-one vote manner. As a practical matter, Wikipedia doesn't have a way of enabling voting by the entire community of Wikipedians, but there are a couple of reasonable approximations that we could attempt: (1) Have Jimbo appoint a governing committee. This would inevitably be a non-representative subset of the entire community, but having Jimbo as our benevolent dictator is also non-representative. The advantage of a governing committee is that it could be SOMEWHAT more representative of the entire committee than just Jimbo by himself, and it could also take some of the work off his shoulders. (2) Establish a voting system, through which a large subset of the entire Wikipedia community is authorized to vote. Obviously we'll need some way to exclude spam-voting by anonymous abusers, but if we gave a vote to everyone who has supplied a unique and verified email address, that would be a close enough approximation to universal enfranchisement for practical purposes. (3) Use the voting system to create a "parliament" of elected representatives, whose members are charged with setting policies on behalf of the entire community. (4) Alternately, we could try to develop a system of "policy juries," through which everyone occasionally gets asked at random to participate in policy decisions. For a discussion of how policy juries work, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarchy --Sheldon Rampton