The Cunctator wrote:

On 12/12/02 5:26 PM, "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:

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The software is already set up for Jimbo's proposal (all we have to do is turn on one setting).

This has nothing to do with the merits of the idea.

Not directly, but it is relevant in that we can implement it in 5 minutes time and it requires virtually no commitment of resources to either make it happen or undo it if we don't like it. Other proposals for team moderation would require us to commit resources to programming.

(And, as an open source project, we the people who desire change can't really "commit resources" because the programmers will only do what they feel like doing anyway. :-))

Cunc, it seems like you're the strongest holdout.

I've got people in private email telling me that it's imperative that we institute a formal voting procedure, because consensus can't work in a group of this size. It is claimed that any one person can block change, even if that one person agrees that the current situation is not very desirable. I want to prove them wrong, and you can help me in a pretty obvious way. :-)

Suppose we commit to a very light moderation, by me, which you said you could accept, with others helping out by doing approvals of posts. AND we commit to setting up and testing a bbs system as you've proposed several times in the past.

We experiment -- wikien-l becomes moderated. wikipedia-l stays unmoderated and migrates to a bbs/email system. We later revisit the issue (March 1st, I propose) and see how it's working out in practice.

Some of your objections are concerns I share... for example, under moderation, the pace of a list is slowed down. But, by how much, and does it help or hinder productive discussions? That's an empirical question, and it depends on how many approvers we have and how often they are logged in, etc.

--Jimbo

On 12/13/02 6:15 AM, "Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com wrote:

Suppose we commit to a very light moderation, by me, which you said you could accept, with others helping out by doing approvals of posts. AND we commit to setting up and testing a bbs system as you've proposed several times in the past.

We experiment -- wikien-l becomes moderated. wikipedia-l stays unmoderated and migrates to a bbs/email system. We later revisit the issue (March 1st, I propose) and see how it's working out in practice.

We can try that, but I'm not sure what good that would do. A lot of it depends on who the approvers are. Their biases/likes would determine who would participate, and what kind of participation that would be. And by creating a contrast between wikipedia-l and wikien-l we're implying that they're somehow different in tone and content, rather than focus.

One thing: we've had a lot of call for moderation, but little explication of what the direct issues are that moderation would solve. What exactly are these problems?

There would need to be a clear determination beforehand of what will be moderated. And things like "no personal attacks" are too vague to be a clear moderation guideline. Even "avoid topical discussion" is hard, because some degree of appeal to specific entries/topics is necessary for discussion of broad points.

Ed Poor brought up the "If a single veto were to derail..." If a single veto were to derail this, I'd be happy to veto it. But I don't expect or really want that to be the case. I will tell you why I think this is a bad idea. But direct experience is a better teacher.

I think what would make more sense is for someone/a group of people to moderate a "best-of" list, in which posts from wikipedia-l or wikien-l, say no more than 5 or 10 a day? maybe fewer? would be forwarded. Replies to the posts would go back to wikipedia-l or wikien-l.

Certainly, if we decide to go forward with list moderation, I'll try to help find the best form of it, but that won't mean I'll think it's a good idea.

On 12/13/02 1:25 PM, "Fred Bauder" fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:

on 12/13/02 11:06 AM, The Cunctator at cunctator@kband.com wrote:

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We can try that, but I'm not sure what good that would do. A lot of it depends on who the approvers are. Their biases/likes would determine who would participate, and what kind of participation that would be. And by creating a contrast between wikipedia-l and wikien-l we're implying that they're somehow different in tone and content, rather than focus.

Hopefully the moderators will consciously suspend their bias (those that they are aware of) and hopefully Jimbo will choose folks who have some self-awareness. This ought not be a way to continue the struggle by other means. It should be a list issue if that is the behavior we see.

It's the biases they're not aware of that are the problem. The simplest mechanism for tackling these biases is putting every decision made by the moderators to the light. If someone's post is blocked or delayed, they (and possibly everyone) should know who made the decision (and possibly why).

...

There would need to be a clear determination beforehand of what will be moderated. And things like "no personal attacks" are too vague to be a clear moderation guideline. Even "avoid topical discussion" is hard, because some degree of appeal to specific entries/topics is necessary for discussion of broad points.

Like pornography, one knows it when one sees it, a typical attack will generally include "stupid" blah blah, scatological references etc. Posts on topics are the same, when they start getting into the details, the debated issues, we all know it belongs on the discussion page of the article.

Pardon me for saying it, but the U.S. judicial standard on pornography is not the kind of standard that we should be using. We don't need to emulate the braindead handling of sex and pornography in the U.S.

Rather, if we *can't* explicate clear guidelines of what is not acceptable, then we shouldn't be moderating. I'm not saying that all judgment should be removed, but that such judgment should be clearly defined.

On 12/13/02 1:47 PM, "Fred Bauder" fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:

on 12/13/02 11:35 AM, The Cunctator at cunctator@kband.com wrote:

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Rather, if we *can't* explicate clear guidelines of what is not acceptable, then we shouldn't be moderating. I'm not saying that all judgment should be removed, but that such judgment should be clearly defined.

You see, that's the trap: define it clearly so someone can play games with it. Best just to say: Be courteous and address some subject relevant to wiki.

Rules are evil, evil, evil...

So is shifting the responsibility to be courteous and relevant off of the participants.

If we are to invoke the evil of censors/moderators, they need to be bound by the evil of rules.

That's interesting. The campaign for a voting procedure, repeatedly rejected by the mailing list, is now continued via private email directly to you? Could we have more details?

I mailed Jimbo about something else and the discussion developed naturally from there. I'm not sure if anyone else contacted Jimbo about it. I don't think you need to worry though -- Jimbo is about as opposed as voting as possible. That doesn't meant that I'll give up anytime soon.

Repeatedly rejected "by the mailing list" is an untrue claim. You seem to have a habit of suggesting wide agreement where none exists in order to discredit arguments you do not like.

Regards,

Erik

One of the strongest arguments that I've made against voting is that voting is usually game theoretically bad. I can explain what I mean by that if anyone is interested, but basically I think that we can find better solutions under a consensus-seeking incentive system than a power-bloc-seeking incentive system.

My main argument against consensus is that we do not really use what I would consider a consensus process. A consensus process, in my opinion, is a process where you argue for some time, and eventually find a solution that everyone at least is willing to tolerate. In reality, in most past cases our process has been one where people come from very different positions and never really arrive at what could be considered a compromise pleasing to all (or even "nearly" all) parties -- we're just too large and too different for that to work, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

So what happens -- as in the case of what we should do with Clutch, with Lir, with TMC, as in recent NPOV discussions etc. -- is that usually Jimbo weighs in after a while and the matter is settled, for a variety of reasons which center around Jimbo's role in the project and the respect people have for him. This is not really a consensus process -- it's a discussion process with a benevolent dictator as the ultimate arbitrator and decision maker. Jimbo says he only tries to quantify the "intensity" of disagreement and whether a "nearly unanimous" consensus has been reached, but it's not that mechanical, especially as there are no fixed criteria for this. Once these are more and more precisely defined, the system gets closer and closer to an actual voting system.

I think we all know that, too, but we like to uphold the "consensus" picture because it pleases us more. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is necessarily bad (Linux is, after all, a benevolent dictator project as well), just that it has its flaws, especially in the unlikely case that Jimbo is wrong. It also has scalability problems.

The Debian project uses Concordet voting, BTW.

What I think we should do, and could do, is implement a basic voting system in the Wikipedia engine that would allow people to create polls (ideally offering different voting methods -- if you just have yes/no as choices, first past the post seems fine). These could be used to collect data informally in various situations, like the recent moderation debate. They would NOT be accepted, by policy, as a way to assert that X or Y should be done, just a method to tabulate/quantify opinions. People are already doing this manually (votes for NPOV , votes for deletion, votes for ..), and it seems difficult to argue that we shouldn't simplify things.

I would be willing to work on that (could take a while, but I won't forget it). Magnus has also expressed interest in this area.

We could then also have a formal process to use such polls as the basis of actual decisions in cases where consensus seems unattainable (what Jimbo chatacterized as the very few cases where voting might be necessary to make a decision). The decision whether to use a poll for this purpose in an individual case would rest with Jimbo.

That way we can explore the different options available carefully, without imposing anything. There are certainly arguments that can be made for or against either the consensus/BD or the voting process. What I think we should resist is the temptation to avoid changing our process because of fear of change itself. Wikis themselves are the result of an evolutionary process, and this evolution shouldn't stop.

Regards,

Erik

But it has not yet done so to decide a particular controversial issue, I think. Only leadership elections and the choice of a logo. So we don't have a guide there to see how well it might work.

But, but, the Debian logo rules! ;-)

Regards,

Erik

Although I remain for now an opponent of voting, I can play devil's advocate and answer some of Axel's concerns, I think.

Axel Boldt wrote:

That's unrealistic: in reality, once an issue has been put up for a vote and one side has lost, the issue would be considered pretty much settled and anybody arguing further would be considered a sore loser. This is why many people rush to ad-hoc votes: they want the debate to end.

This could be alleviated to a significant extent by having long time periods of discussion before the vote is finalized. We've been talking about some kind of moderation for some of the mailing lists, and it seems like the discussion has already died down. If I were to set January 31st as the date of the vote, with voting to be conducted until February 15th, this would be plenty of time for lots of discussion.

After all, what is the point of "collecting data informally and to tabulate/quantify opinions", if not to make a decision? The fact that 56.4% of all Wikipedians favor XYZ is clearly no substantial argument for or against XYZ.

Right, but this is where voting proponents say that other voting rules might be better. For example, we might say that we're adopting a position of rough conservatism and that any proposal for a major change requires a win by a certain percentage, not just 50% win in a simple majority.

It might be argued "Who is to decide what we're voting on, and what counts as a major issue, and what the alternatives are, and how they are worded?" Those might be good questions, but the answer could remain essentially the same as now: right now, ultimately, *I* decide, after listening to everyone and trying to modify a proposal until there is little disagreement.

I have no intention of giving up benevolent dictatorship anytime soon, and with regard to really big issues (i.e. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a humor site), things will never change.

If 99% of wikipedians decided, for example, that the Wikipedia should become a pro-American pro-libertarian POV reference work, I'd just say: fine, go away, and the 2 people who are left with me will continue to work on wikipedia.

But if 99% of wikipedians have an opinion counter to mine on virtually any less central issue, I'll go along. That's what happens now.

--Jimbo