In reply to Virgilio's comments:
1 "What would happen if all administrators, bureaucrats and so on were told to take a hike"
I don't know about other projects, but within a few days, perhaps hours the English Wikipedia would be trashed. With no admins to block vandals or delete attack pages, and no pages that were admin only for editing then not only would spammers and cyber bullies have a field day and the most common templates would be magnets for penis picture vandalism. Within a few days or at the most a week or two the foundation and all the wiki mirrors would either have to go offline or revert to the last "clean" version of the pedia in read only mode.
Then the foundation and or one or more other organisations would reopen for editing having recruited a set of moderators. I'd hope that one of the forks would be an advertising free volunteer run wiki much like Wikipedia and with many of the current administrators, I'd be surprised if at least one of the forks wasn't commercially run, advertising funded with paid moderators. Assuming there was some notice of the decision to tell the admins to "take a hike" the transition to a fork might be quite seamless, and the mirrors would probably have the sense to stop taking updates from the moment you handed Wikipedia over to the vandals.
2 What would happen if new requirements for being administrator and so forth included assuming real identities,
Even if you paid them, a lot of people would baulk at disclosing their real world identities when blocking paedophiles and the point of view warriors of every contentious issue on the planet. There are sites that went down the route of requiring all editors to identify, and providing you aren't ambitious and don't want a large community that can work. But I'm not aware of any site that has allowed anyone to edit but required those who deal with its vandals to disclose their real identity, more common I think is to allow anyone to create an account but pay moderators whose real identity is known to the office but who have role accounts for editing.
3 and a set of real world qualifications.
Interesting but what qualifications would you require? Better qualified people cost more and expect work that requires some of their expertise. For deleting spam and attack pages and blocking vandals you certainly don't need a high school diploma. IT literacy, written fluency in the relevant language and some communication skill and the ability to spot vandalism is required. I'm not aware of a relevant real world qualification, but our existing though flawed request for adminship process is effective at weeding out those without such skills.
4 What it would be like to grant amnesty to all that are currently banned and/or blocked.
It is just fine, providing we continue to only grant amnesty to those who accept the terms of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Standard_offer A blanket amnesty on other terms would only make sense if we wanted to compete with Encyclopaedia dramatica.
5 What it would be like if there was separation of powers,
Not very different from today. At the moment the same admin can't block someone and decline their unblock. If you had two different groups, admins who blocked and another group of editors who considered unblocks then things would be a little slower, especially when an admin blocked someone by accident and had to get an unblocker to reverse their mistake. So slower, more bureaucratic and less efficient, but most editors would never notice a difference.
6 and secret balloting.
We use Secret ballots for Arbcom elections, it makes sense to do so when you are deciding which 8 out of 13 candidates to support and you wind up voting against some candidates because you think that others are better for the role. We don't use secret ballots for appointing administrators because, speaking from experience, rejected candidates want to know why they were deemed unsuitable and what they need to change or learn before trying again.
7 I wonder what it would be like if Wikimedia projects would borrow a little more from democratic principles.
It would be much easier to change things, and we would all have to get used to changes happening that didn't attempt to compromise with our objections. In a democracy if 51% want to implement a change and 49% prefer the status quo then the 51% win and the 49% lose. In Wikimedia both "sides" need to understand each other and try to come up with a solution that achieves what the 51% wanted but without doing the things that the 49% didn't want. In practice that isn't always possible and sometimes you get a logjam where most people want change but we don't have consensus for a particular change, however we are only just over ten years old and I doubt if any of our logjams are even as old as that. One of the interesting things for our next few decades will be to see how successful we are at eventually getting consensus solutions to problems that currently seem intractable. Personally I'm optimistic and think that a measurable minority of the problems that currently evade a consensus solution will have been resolved even before the end of our second decade.
8 Scary thoughts aren't they?
No. But thanks for posing them.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
Message: 3 Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2011 05:43:41 +0100 From: "Virgilio A. P. Machado" vam@fct.unl.pt Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: mailman.35468.1302418463.28183.foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
I know that nobody has the guts to do it, but I wonder... I wonder what would happen if all administrators, bureaucrats and so on where told to take a hike. What would happen if new requirements for being administrator and so forth included assuming real identities, and a set of real world qualifications. What it would be like to grant amnesty to all that are currently banned and/or blocked. What it would be like if there was separation of powers, and secret balloting. I wonder what it would be like if Wikimedia projects would borrow a little more from democratic principles. Yes, I wonder... Scary thoughts aren't they? No surprise though, coming from someone who is the scourge of countless Wikimedia projects and a troll according to many.
Sincerely,
Virgilio A. P. Machado
More comments:
*1 "What would happen if all administrators, bureaucrats and so on were told to take a hike" * Apart from the oddness of having a community choose people it wishes to do these roles and then telling them to "take a hike" (the community choose these, they aren't imposed), WereSpielChequers has it right. * ** 2 What would happen if new requirements for being administrator and so forth included assuming real identities, * If you want to identify influential users I suggest you start with Featured Article writers, for surely the people who write content and are involved in its assessment as being shown to the world on the main page and described as highest quality (and most authoritative by implication) are highly influential users. Which is to highlight the illogic of the question.
Administrators are not highly influential compared to two other groups - those who write high quality content (main page, tagged as "featured article" etc) and the mass of general users who together create the ethos of the site and a lot of any social issues. Administrators get a lot of attention because they have a disproportionate involvement in addressing abuse and inter-user misconduct, which is largely what the tools handle, but not convinced this makes administrators of any great stature in the community.
*3 and a set of real world qualifications. * What would the point of this be? Neither in theory nor practice do administrators have specific roles in content work. Should we require real-world qualifications from editors generally? I think not - the skill an editor needs is editing, which is to say the ability to review sources and summarize them fairly. They usually don't need topic-specific qualifications to do that.
*4 What it would be like to grant amnesty to all that are currently banned and/or blocked. * Probably dispute and disruption mayhem. Most bans and significant duration blocks - the vast majority - are people whose interest is vandalism, attacks, and spam. Of the rest the vast majority again are people whose way of working involves incidental or deliberate degradation of the editing environment for others or for readers. A small minotiry may well benefit from review, but not nearly enough for a general unconditional amnesty to the vast majority who probably would not.
*5 What it would be like if there was separation of powers * This prsumably means we have people who edit, and people who handle disputes/operate the tools. Presumably those who use tools would either be recruited directly as non-editors, or would give up editing. I cannot see a better way to create a group of users who don't know how to use tools wisely, than to demand one or the other of these. It's far better that we keep as it is - users who use enhanced tools are editors first and foremost, come from the community, are nominated by the community, and still remain immersed in the community as editors thereafter.
*6 and secret balloting. * Not convinced either way on the "secret ballot" issue nor a strong view on it. There are also advantages to seeing specific views and being able to weigh them and comment on / discuss them.
*7 I wonder what it would be like if Wikimedia projects would borrow a little more from democratic principles. * You don't say which principles. The ones that polarize society (Republicans/Democrats, for example, who attack each other rather than look for points of similarity)? On a wiki page people ultimately have to learn to co-exist. Those who can't or won't gradually sooner or later gain wider attention for that reason. I think that's a lesson most democratic countries could learn from us, not the other way round.
*8 Scary thoughts aren't they? * No. I don't find them scary at all. Thanks for them.
FT2
On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 11:28 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
In reply to Virgilio's comments:
1 "What would happen if all administrators, bureaucrats and so on were told to take a hike"
I don't know about other projects, but within a few days, perhaps hours the English Wikipedia would be trashed. With no admins to block vandals or delete attack pages, and no pages that were admin only for editing then not only would spammers and cyber bullies have a field day and the most common templates would be magnets for penis picture vandalism. Within a few days or at the most a week or two the foundation and all the wiki mirrors would either have to go offline or revert to the last "clean" version of the pedia in read only mode.
Then the foundation and or one or more other organisations would reopen for editing having recruited a set of moderators. I'd hope that one of the forks would be an advertising free volunteer run wiki much like Wikipedia and with many of the current administrators, I'd be surprised if at least one of the forks wasn't commercially run, advertising funded with paid moderators. Assuming there was some notice of the decision to tell the admins to "take a hike" the transition to a fork might be quite seamless, and the mirrors would probably have the sense to stop taking updates from the moment you handed Wikipedia over to the vandals.
2 What would happen if new requirements for being administrator and so forth included assuming real identities,
Even if you paid them, a lot of people would baulk at disclosing their real world identities when blocking paedophiles and the point of view warriors of every contentious issue on the planet. There are sites that went down the route of requiring all editors to identify, and providing you aren't ambitious and don't want a large community that can work. But I'm not aware of any site that has allowed anyone to edit but required those who deal with its vandals to disclose their real identity, more common I think is to allow anyone to create an account but pay moderators whose real identity is known to the office but who have role accounts for editing.
3 and a set of real world qualifications.
Interesting but what qualifications would you require? Better qualified people cost more and expect work that requires some of their expertise. For deleting spam and attack pages and blocking vandals you certainly don't need a high school diploma. IT literacy, written fluency in the relevant language and some communication skill and the ability to spot vandalism is required. I'm not aware of a relevant real world qualification, but our existing though flawed request for adminship process is effective at weeding out those without such skills.
4 What it would be like to grant amnesty to all that are currently banned and/or blocked.
It is just fine, providing we continue to only grant amnesty to those who accept the terms of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Standard_offer A blanket amnesty on other terms would only make sense if we wanted to compete with Encyclopaedia dramatica.
5 What it would be like if there was separation of powers,
Not very different from today. At the moment the same admin can't block someone and decline their unblock. If you had two different groups, admins who blocked and another group of editors who considered unblocks then things would be a little slower, especially when an admin blocked someone by accident and had to get an unblocker to reverse their mistake. So slower, more bureaucratic and less efficient, but most editors would never notice a difference.
6 and secret balloting.
We use Secret ballots for Arbcom elections, it makes sense to do so when you are deciding which 8 out of 13 candidates to support and you wind up voting against some candidates because you think that others are better for the role. We don't use secret ballots for appointing administrators because, speaking from experience, rejected candidates want to know why they were deemed unsuitable and what they need to change or learn before trying again.
7 I wonder what it would be like if Wikimedia projects would borrow a little more from democratic principles.
It would be much easier to change things, and we would all have to get used to changes happening that didn't attempt to compromise with our objections. In a democracy if 51% want to implement a change and 49% prefer the status quo then the 51% win and the 49% lose. In Wikimedia both "sides" need to understand each other and try to come up with a solution that achieves what the 51% wanted but without doing the things that the 49% didn't want. In practice that isn't always possible and sometimes you get a logjam where most people want change but we don't have consensus for a particular change, however we are only just over ten years old and I doubt if any of our logjams are even as old as that. One of the interesting things for our next few decades will be to see how successful we are at eventually getting consensus solutions to problems that currently seem intractable. Personally I'm optimistic and think that a measurable minority of the problems that currently evade a consensus solution will have been resolved even before the end of our second decade.
8 Scary thoughts aren't they?
No. But thanks for posing them.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
Message: 3 Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2011 05:43:41 +0100 From: "Virgilio A. P. Machado" vam@fct.unl.pt Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: mailman.35468.1302418463.28183.foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
I know that nobody has the guts to do it, but I wonder... I wonder what would happen if all administrators, bureaucrats and so on where told to take a hike. What would happen if new requirements for being administrator and so forth included assuming real identities, and a set of real world qualifications. What it would be like to grant amnesty to all that are currently banned and/or blocked. What it would be like if there was separation of powers, and secret balloting. I wonder what it would be like if Wikimedia projects would borrow a little more from democratic principles. Yes, I wonder... Scary thoughts aren't they? No surprise though, coming from someone who is the scourge of countless Wikimedia projects and a troll according to many.
Sincerely,
Virgilio A. P. Machado
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Apr 10, 2011, at 6:28 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
4 What it would be like to grant amnesty to all that are currently banned and/or blocked.
It is just fine, providing we continue to only grant amnesty to those who accept the terms of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Standard_offer A blanket amnesty on other terms would only make sense if we wanted to compete with Encyclopaedia dramatica.
I think it would even be fine without such an offer. Unless we're talking about an amnesty followed by an inability to re-block those who abuse it, I think this would only be a irritation in the short term, especially if it's done in an opt-in rather than opt-out manner (i.e., you must put the {{unblock}} template on your page and ask for the amnesty in order to be unblocked/unbanned).
-Dan
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org