I think one thing leads to another here. Incivility leads to loss of editors of all genders. ArbCom has too narrow of a function and too little time to deal with every case of incivility. We have a lack of effective governance to be able to bring about a solution to all of these issues. The conversation kindof jumped around a bit, but we have hit on some very serious issues. Operationally, everything works, as far as management, we are effectively leaderless and without any clear way to govern - the consensus process being so easily thrown off course it's become useless for any large-scale contentious issue. It's not that we are unable to make decisions, it's that we are unable to make controversial ones. We have a judiciary of sorts for our community, but the design as a court of last resort, coupled with the lack of any other authority with sufficient clout to deal with more established contributors, effectively cripple us, because every other process except ejection ("community ban") by community consensus is toothless, and consensus to eject a vested contributor doesn't happen short of them going suddenly and completely berserk and staying that way for an extended period of time. Admins can deal effectively enough with harmful behavior from "outsiders", but the effectiveness disappears in all but open-and-shut policy violations where it concerns another admin or an established contributor. So, that leaves us with several problems: We need an effective way to sanction any member of the community that is disruptive or incivil. We need ArbCom to become more of an appellate than the sole "court" of English Wikipedia, because they can't scale to that, and because they are specifically tasked with the worst problems, not with the "death by a thousand cuts" of borderline disruption. A start would be some form of binding dispute resolution that doesn't require ArbCom involvement, but it has to be binding, and it has to be able to consistently result in sanctions if the dispute resolution process fails - without the case having to go before ArbCom first. As far as fixing dispute resolution, I suggest that a first measure, we restore and revamp the mediation system and make it binding. The way this would work, mediators would begin to be elected or appointed to reach a suitable number of mediators for the expected caseload. Mediators would be assigned to cases requesting mediation, under the condition that prior dispute resolution steps must have been attempted - or that only one of the parties were willing to participate in dispute resolution. Once a case was reviewed and accepted, it would enter a binding mediation. Editors participating in binding mediations would reach a solution mutually agreeable to the parties and found reasonable (by the standards of policy and practical enforceability) by the mediators, or the failure to do so would be submitted to arbcom along with the prior chain of dispute resolution activity and could potentially form further evidence of tenditiousness and incivility. Agreements reached from mediation would be binding on the parties, in that the standard remedies of "any uninvolved administrator" being able to enforce an agreement would apply, and such agreements would stand until renegotiated or appealed to ArbCom. Finally, mediators would be given access to an expedited ArbCom process (essentially, the ability to ask ArbCom for an injunction in a case that has not yet been presented to them) for obtaining injunctions in order to stop a disputed activity while negotiations take place - injunctions of this nature would expire after reaching an agreement through mediation, or after reaching a decision through arbitration. -Stephanie On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:

Got sidetracked and didn't put the other parts of what I wanted to say in... Ok. Once we have mediation restructured to take the load off ArbCom, that leaves effective governance, and effective policing as key parts of a fix. Effective governance is a key because without it, as Scott said, tenditiousness and bullheaded persistence become the only ways to get things done. That means we need a stronger executive that can decide to break deadlocks when they happen, or lend structure to debate so that it can run it's course, as appropriate for the situation. I'm not saying that they should have unbridled "Jimboesque" authority, but they should be able to step up in any situation where consensus process doesn't seem to be working. That IMO means an "advice and consent" model, where advice comes from previous discussion, and consent comes by virtue of the office, as well as from the ability of the community to formally reject it's actions by referendum. Policing is tricky, because of the fact that calling a dick a dick is itself a dickish move, but sometimes it's the only way to get the message across. To that end, a warnings tool would be helpful, supplementing or replacing the uw- templates with a MediaWiki extension that requires that warnings be acknowledged by the editor to continue editing, and providing a record of warnings. This is basically a very soft block that the editor is free to remove themselves. Warnings need not be generally visible except in the case where a matter progresses to arbitration, but they should persist for a period of time so that patterns of behavior become apparent. -Stephanie On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Stephanie Daugherty <sdaugherty(a)gmail.com> wrote:

The closing of debates is something an elected council could do. That preserves the role of the community in formulating and debating policy. Fred

Promising suggestion Fred

On 1 February 2011 20:33, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: The arbcom are already politicians, elected and all. Wikipedia is a city of 160,000 people any given month. Politics happens when two people are in the same room, let alone 160,000. - d.

on 2/1/11 5:32 PM, David Goodman at dggenwp(a)gmail.com wrote: <Snip> Because it, as well as its needs, have grown beyond its original structure. And then what, David? It cannot do everything, or suit David, are you really saying what I hear you saying - ["]If you don't like the way things are, go someplace else["]?! Marc <Snip>

On 01/02/2011, David Goodman &lt;dggenwp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: You don't seem to live in the same world as other editors. In most cases attempts to change Wikipedia's policy in reasonable ways fails because somebody, somewhere will think that virtually any change could, theoretically, backfire in some nightmare scenario that they believe in their heart of hearts 100% definitely will transpire, or because they assume bad faith of the editor, or any number of other what if looked at closely are fairly weird reasons. The idea that if bad things did happen as a result of a change; that they could be reverted as easily as the change to the policy, that ironically never, ever stops anyone reverting changes to policy. The normal case where changes are done, and stick, involve some sort of gang of editors of some description. The gangs aren't necessarily up to no good, but that's the normal way it happens. -- -Ian Woollard

The notion that what new editors really value is the ability to participate in policy discussions, and that any move away from that is "dangerous" is just more nonsense of the libertine variety. We are building an encyclopedia - remember that? The rest is just pragmatic sausage making. What makes new editors stay or leave is a good editing experience. We understand that there's many problems with that experience, and many ways we might change Wikipedia that might improve it for them. However, we can't do that because the current way of changing policy is defective, fights all innovations, and privileges those wishing to oppose any reforms. But now we are told that we can't change the policy-making process, because we potentially violate the new editor's highly valued right to full participation in said defective process? What are we saying? "Wikipedia: the encyclopedia where everyone gets an equal right to vainly bang their head against a policy brick wall". Amazingly a project that began with risk taking an innovation has now managed to allow the fear of change and reactionaries to call the shots. (Oops, that's not civil either!) Scott -----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Carcharoth Sent: 02 February 2011 00:31 To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors} - repost On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 12:24 AM, Ian Woollard &lt;ian.woollard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Goodness, is that an incivil comment? :-) FWIW, I agree with nearly everything DGG wrote. Moving away from what makes Wikipedia different is a step that is fraught with danger. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Ken Arromdee &lt;arromdee(a)rahul.net&gt; wrote: ...And a policy discussion which was driven by a small, vocal, and policy-active minority, who drove a solution upstream against a consensus gap. The long term damage that incident did has been consistently shoveled under the rug. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On Thu, 3 Feb 2011, Carcharoth wrote: Spoiler warnings. And no, it's not on my userpage.

In the case of your proposals, imposition of arbitrary authority; loss of volunteer and donor support; and lose of editorial independence. Fred

You were talking about something else. However even the council is a bad idea with anonymous editors electing it. We have no idea what kind of skulduggery is involved. Secret ballot by anonymous people; what kind of sense does that make? Fred

We seem to be confusing several separate issues here. 1) Directive versus self organising organisations. Those who believe that centrally controlled, planned organisations are inherently superior to and less chaotic than decentralised self organising organisations where power is devolved and individuals empowered to make decisions will tend to have a problem with the way Wikipedia runs itself. In political terms I see this as a Marxist Leninist/Liberal divide, I don't know why there are still people out there who think that a planned organisation with a strong leader should outperform unplanned but cooperating groups of empowered people, but there are people with that view and they will tend to think of Wikipedia as chaotic, and consider chaotic a criticism. I'm not convinced that real world political ideologies have a good match with Wikipolitics, but I will happily admit to being a Liberal in my instinctive assumption that "strong leadership" is more often a disadvantage than an advantage. 2) Consensus versus Wikipedia's interpretation of consensus. Consensus building requires all or most participants to be willing to discuss their differences and seek common ground. It fails when people realise that to frustrate change all they need achieve is a blocking minority. 3) Direct versus indirect Democracy Direct democracy has the disadvantage that it doesn't scale up as well as indirect democracy, and there is an argument that at one point EN wiki was getting too big to work as a direct democracy, however as the active editorship and active admin cadres are both dwindling that argument is losing strength. Direct democracy has the failing that a small minority of the clueless can give you inconsistent decisions; If 49% want better services and are willing to pay the taxes to fund it, and 49% would like to have better public services but not if that means paying the taxes that would be needed, and 2% want low taxes and better services, then in a direct democracy the 2% win both referenda and the idea of referenda takes a knock, whilst in an indirect democracy the 2% are the swing voters who decide which of the other options wins. But it does have the advantage that you have a group of people from the whole community who are empowered to rule on intractable local disputes such as climate change and various nationalistic arguments. Whilst depending on the people who turn up risks driving off all but the fundamentalists. The case for more indirect, elected democracy in Wikipedia would either depend on the argument that the community has scenarios where existing procedures have produced inconsistent results, or where the only people who turn up are involved, or that this is an acceptable way to get round the drawbacks of consensus. My own experience of getting change on Wikpedia has been mixed, I was involved in BLP prod, one of the biggest recent changes, and little but remarkably uncontentious changes such as the death anomalies project - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-09-13/Sister… Some of my other attempts to change Wikipedia have been rather less successful. So I've got a lot of sympathy with those who want change that has majority but not consensus support, much fellow feeling with those who support a change but accept that the community doesn't agree with them, and rather less sympathy with those who try to impose what they believe is right even if they know that the majority oppose them. WereSpielChequers On 2 February 2011 02:59, Marc Riddell &lt;michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net&gt; wrote:

Yes, blocking, by an small group, or even an individual (in other contexts) is fine IF they have a good argument, especially if it is obvious others in the discussion don't understand that argument yet. It should not result in sterile deadlocks though. I continue to support that kind of council as a promising idea. Fred

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Stephanie Daugherty &lt;sdaugherty(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The fact that consensus can change on Wikipedia is both its great strength and its great weakness. It is possible, if the stars are aligned right (i.e. the right people show up to the discussion), to 'change' a long-established consensus. Sometimes it emerges, through later discussion and participation, that this so-called change in consensus was illusory or false. Sometimes, it emerges that the consensus had in fact changed, and the change to the status quo was correct. Finding this out, though, takes lots of time and discussion. This is the weakness of the consensus-based system, in that you sometimes need endless discussion merely to maintain the status quo. And also that for some situations, consensus can swing from side to side, between two or more different camps. Assessing the consensus requires looking at both the short-term arguments and the long-term trends. Otherwise you end up with a system where things chop-and-change constantly, and no stability is achieved. The classic example is naming debates, where a great deal of time and energy goes into discussing what title an article should be at, and if consensus was truly ruled on every few months, you might get a situation where an article was at one name for a few months, and then at another name for another few months. Clearly that sort of result just drains time and resources away from where it should be focused, and allows people to obsess over specific issues rather than looking at the big picture. This is why allowing the status quo to stay in the absence of consensus otherwise is used. Anything else leads to increased instability. Either that, or you insist on and enforce moratoriums on repeating the same debates until a set period of time has passed. Accept that the present discussion (whatever it is) has run its course, and move on to work on other things, and then return to the old discussion after that set period of time has passed. Over time, you build up a long-term picture of how and whether consensus is changing over month and years, or not, as the participants and arguments change and evolve and mature. Carcharoth

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 5:11 PM, Ian Woollard &lt;ian.woollard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I am shaking in my boots. Woe is us! You're channeling one of the Terry Pratchett books here, aren't you? I hereby announce the second party; we're the California Conservative party. We believe in "God-or-outmoded-concept saving the Queen" (in the San Francisco sense; see [[Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence]]) and will adopt a modification of the Aspen Drug and Gun club ("Death before Dishonor, Drugs before Lunch"). -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

on 2/2/11 2:41 PM, David Goodman at dggenwp(a)gmail.com wrote: I apologize David, I did misread your statement. Thank you for this writing. Like you, I believe very strongly in the ideas and goals of the Wikipedia Project. But I fear for its future. I have made these fears known, and have tried to make rational suggestions as to how to prevent what will happen if the behemoth that the Project has become does not improve its organizational structure. What I have encountered in this effort are two basic types of persons: Those, blind in their euphoria, still dancing on airplane wings; and those whose own self-interests have blinded them, and caused them to resist any change that would effect those self-interests. Fortunately, there is a third, much smaller (right now) group who can put aside their emotions and self-interests, think rationally beyond today and consider the future of the Project. They are the Movement within the Movement. They're the hope. As for me, I have said all that I can say at this point. It's time for me to step back and watch. Marc