Erik Moeller wrote:
2009/1/8 Marc Riddell:
- A person at the Foundation level who has true, sensitive inter-personal as
well a inter-group skills, and who would keep a close eye on the Project looking for impasses when they arise. The person would need to be objective and lobby-resistant ;-). This would be the person of absolute last resort in settling community-confounding problems.
Aside from section 230 concerns, my primary concern about the appointment of any single person to such a role would be scalability across languages and projects. I continue to believe that the idea, proposed I think by GerardM, to have a Meta-ArbCom as an institution of last resort for dispute resolution could be very helpful, and easier to get off the ground than any kind of general council.
Perhaps in the earliest days Jimbo performed that role, but even viewing all of his actions in the best possible light still leaves the insurmountable scalability problem. It is hard to imagine any other Solomon scalably capable of fulfilling the theological side of the god-king function.
The difficulty with ArbCom in this context is that it remains by nature a quasi-judicial process. Those who come before it on either side of a dispute do so with pre-established positions, often based on legalistic interpretations of literal rules. When an issue is caught up in such an adversarial maelstrom it is far more difficult to arrive at a collaborative solution. If we further treat ArbCom decisions as de facto precedents, resolution of the problems themselves, apart from the personalities involved, becomes even more difficult.
My own vision of a volunteer council absolutely did not include a Meta-ArbCom. That would almost certainly have doomed it to ineffectiveness. My belief here is based on the principle of the separation of judicial and legislative functions. Putting this in terms of the scientific method: it conflates legislative theorizing with judicial hypothesis testing.
Impossibility notwithstanding, Marc does draw attention to a serious problem.
*This is more of a cultural issue: I would like to see the more established members of the community be more open to criticism and dissent from within the community.
To me, this is synonymous with openness to systemic change in general. Wikipedia[n]s tend to become resilient against systemic change as policies and practices become established and entrenched. To some extent this is necessary to serve the mission of the project. In other cases it's debatable: e.g., is a predominantly deletionist community "better" or "worse" to serve the mission of the project than a predominantly inclusionist one?
I think a fundamental inhibition against change is that people don't know how to achieve it: the lack of clarity in decision making processes is almost a usability issue. This is especially true for contentious large scale decisions. I wonder if WMF should officially "bless" certain decision-making processes, or if that would prevent innovation and experimentation.
Another method to achieve greater openness to change would be to specifically empower a group of people to conduct time-limited trials (technical trials, policy trials, etc.), on the basis of broader community suggestions. These would then be evaluated, with the final decision returned to the community as a whole. This would address the problem that any change that's highly debatable can never be tried out due to lack of consensus.
As the one who first drew attention to the unfortunate phrase "23-member organization" I don't want Marc to be the one taking all the flak for this. I appreciate that the person who used the phrase is willing to consider Marc's points seriously, and are refraining from increasing the voltage in a Milgram experiment as some others are wont to do.
The underlying difficulties are indeed with the decision making process, the perpetual deletion/inclusion debate being only one flash-point within that larger system. We have a significant number of editors who participate actively and regularly on rules development. They spend a great deal of time on such tasks, supported by a number of like-minded individuals who readily arrive at a consensus. Often there is little or no opposition to these developments, because the largest part of the community either does not take time to follow keep up with these developments, or may not be capable of analyzing the deeper implications of these changes. Individuals who must budget their time available for contributions would much rather spend that valuable time working on articles related to their personal interests, and not on endlessly fruitless debates about the minutiæ of rules. Unless they are directly affected by the debate of the moment they won't say anything. There are no doubt comments that I made here six years ago that anticipated this state of things.
I have also consistently had serious reservations about the WMF stepping in to rescue us from ourselves. That could set a precedent. Your fear that WMF blessings might hinder innovation and experimentation is well placed. In some cases such blessings may be the only solution that works. Wisdom may require a recursive mechanism where even the blessing may be changed by following its own rules.
That we don't know how to achieve change is painfully close to the truth. There is the trite statement that Wikipedia is not a democracy, but much of what happens is not at all consistent with that statement either. That statement is nevertheless used by some to win arguments; often equating voting with democracy and concluding that voting is evil. Of course voting is evil, but only a narrow outlook upon democracy will make it equivalent to voting. The suggestion about trials strikes me as a bit gadgety, though there are no doubt specific problems where that would be the preferred way to go, and always a safeguard for community approbation.
Philosophically, we need to reflect the paradigm shift of the interconnectivity of modern communication in the way we make decisions. To some extent the change is already beginning in areas of open source and access, but we have a lot further to go before we can unlearn our old habits about how decisions are made.
Yes, I would support some WMF intervention, but I would also like to see some seriously intense sessions at Wikimania that address matters of collaborative decision making. This would involve more than a one-hour lecture plus Q&A classroom presentation. It could cover a full day, and should probably be led by someone who knows what he is doing, As many potential decision makers as possible should be encouraged to attend, and getting them there could be a major criterion for allocating scholarships to attend Wikimania.
I feel very strongly about the importance of resolving our decision making difficulties, and we can't do it by keeping our thinking in a box.
Ec