> Are you saying that rather than (A) banning jerks,
> we should rather (B) simply revert their "work"
> and drive on without them?
I think this is better than banning them, yes.
Beyond that I'd like to point out that this "hard/soft" security debate, is just part of a larger set of issues. As I see it there are two different kinds of movements bounded set, and center set. A center set movement is defined by its mission or purpose, and have very little interest in determining who's in and who's out of the group. Bounded set movements are very much interested in determining the boundary conditions for group membership. You're in if you do A, B, or C, and out if you do X, Y, or Z. As a center set movement (like the wikipedia community) age, they tend to acquire more and more of the characteristics of bounded set movements.
This can be seen in Larry's proposal to involve more specialists by creating a bounded set movement for them, so they don't have to deal with the "fringe" types, as well as in most of the recent talk about how to better deal with the "fringe" elements.
My overall view is that we ought not to become a bounded set movement. This is my primary concern, and I think the distinction between hard and soft security is of secondary importance. If we were to become more concerned about membership in our club than our mission to build a free encyclopedia, I'm fairly confident that our movement will slowly fall apart.
Yours
Mark Christensen
You Wrote:
>I fight to keep things open, not to tolerate
>anti-social behaviour, but to keep Wikipedia from
>becoming the online equivalent of a police state. I
>believe that soft security is the best way to run a
>wiki community, and that too much hard security will
>eventaully kill us.
>
>If we lock down Wikipedia too tighly, we'll lose
>*most* of our great contributors.
>
>Stephen G.
I agree with this. Just for the record, I don't intend to ban people for name-calling or even being stubborn--I had that opportunity in the case of 24, and thought it was not something that should be done. I just would like to codify our expectations of what users should do: simply try to treat each other with respect. Give each other the benefit of the doubt. Avoid personal attacks.
I do think this is very important. Not everyone has been on the net long; and it's quite easy when first starting online to miss the fact that there are people at a monitor somewhere reading what you just wrote. Online newbies flame a lot without thinking; wikipedia newbies do it a lot too. Let's just make it explicit and encourage people not to.
Let's face it: if we had always been as quick to ban as we are right now, then Larry, The Cunctator, Ed Poor, LDC, and I would all have been banned at one time or another, possibly permanently. (24 is still banned, isn't he? That was meant to be temporary). We've all been trollish, disrespectful, and/or stubborn at one time or another for various reasons. But look: Larry has contributed some fine philosophy articles and was crucial in codifying NPOV; The Cunctator has contributed fine articles on the Sept. 11 attacks and is this list's consciensce; Ed is now a diplomat extraordinaire; Lee is an excellent coder and a workhorse who's also written some first-rate articles on poker.
What I would like is a page to encourage people to be how we want them to be, instead of punishing when they're not. Something simple & direct, e.g. [[Wikipedia:Staying cool when the editing gets hot]]. I don't want to ban everyone who uploads goatse.cx or is adamant about a point of view, but I also don't want people insulting each other and leaving out of frustration. We are a community; we all have the same goals; we all have something to contribute. Let's keep the process open, and let's be as generous with others as others were with us. :-)
kq
I think a police force is can be considered SoftSecurity, so if you
don't consider it so, could you please explain what you mean by term?
People enforcing social norms by quickly reverting the work of vandals
and antisocial jerks is SoftSecurity, if those people are organized and
empowered with social authority that makes no difference, except now it
may seem reasonable to some folks to call that group a "police force" --
which BTW is not Ed's term, but yours.
-----Original Message-----
From: The Cunctator [mailto:cunctator@kband.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 6:13 PM
To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] I'm seeing a trend here or How to keep
drivingaway good contributors
On 10/24/02 5:33 PM, "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor(a)abc.com> wrote:
> Let's come up with a set of guidelines and figure out how to give
> admins the power to enforce them -- in a way that does not curtail the
> ability of contributors to fulfill the mission of Wikipedia.
You're looking at this in not quite the right way. Rather than thinking
about creating a police force (which is what giving one percent of the
users power to enforce rules is) we need to be thinking about
SoftSecurity.
[Wikipedia-l]
To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
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>24.150.61.63 has been off the ban list for quite some time. (Certainly
>since the July upgrade wiped the slate, I'm not sure about before.)
>
>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Hm, if I weren't attending classes full time & working 30 hrs a week, I would have known that. Still, though, I bet mav knew it. ;-)
kq
The Cunctator wrote:
>Especially "no name-calling". What's name-calling? How about just extreme
>sarcasm? And what is vandalism?
Eh, well, vandalism seems self-explanatory: deleting articles (not non-articles, but *articles*) entirely, replacing them with profanity, splattering the goatse picture about....
"No name-calling" just seemed to me a basic to productive discussion. e.g. don't call people fascist or racist, regardless of whether you think it's true, because it's really not going to help prove a point one way or another and certainly won't convince the other person that s/he is wrong. Anyway, that was the idea. Possibly not the right idea, but that's what I was thinking of. And I don't think we should argue that free speech shouldn't be limited at wikipedia--at least not with a straight face--because 24 was banned for suggesting that LMS was not a person and would deserve anything anyone wanted to do to him.
kq
> Just to clarify, there are 40 sysops, about 400 regular
> contributors, 4000 registered contributors, and many
> thousands more readers. I was considering the 4000
> registered contributors the userbase, not the 400 regular
> contributors. In that calculation, the sysops are 1% and
> Jimbo .025%. I don't consider the developers as having the
> power to ban anyone, since they really really shouldn't.
The "registered" list is pretty meaningless; it never gets
cleaned up (another item on my ever growing agenda), so it
has lots of folk who will never been seen again.
Also, the developers clearly have the "power" to block
anyone or anything just as we have the power to make every
page green and purple: having your hands on the code is
about as much power as one can get. But we serve as checks
to each other; if I did something stupid like that, Jimbo
or Brion or Magnus would undo it, and vice versa. We should
work to create explicit cultural norms and guidelines for us
too, so that we have some idea what we really shouldn't do.
I think perhaps what Ed is arguing for, and what I support
as well, is the idea that we should perhaps take the idea of
freedom of action and the act-first-argue-later system that
seems to make Wikipedia work pretty well most of the time and
apply it at the meta-level as well; that is, let the sysops and
developers do what they think is necessary, so long as it can
be undone by others, and not freak out about it. That includes
the drastic things like deleting articles and blocking users.
In other words, let's agree to see them as less drastic because
they're reversible, and accept that mistakes will be made now
and then, but nonetheless give people power--and the cultural
authority--to do them.
> > People enforcing social norms by quickly reverting the work of vandals
> > and antisocial jerks is SoftSecurity, if those people are organized and
> > empowered with social authority that makes no difference, except now it
> > may seem reasonable to some folks to call that group a "police force" --
> > which BTW is not Ed's term, but yours.
>
> I hardly implied it wasn't. It is the case organization and empowerment with
> social authority make only a limited difference from self-organization.
> However, that is not what Ed said. He was discussing granting special powers
> to a group of people differentiated not by social authority but by the law
> of the code (admins).
>
> I just want to make clear that I too very much want to find solutions to the
> problems we have with recalcitrants. Our best approach is to figure out ways
> to make the problems disappear, not ways to fight them.
Yes, I am talking about special powers -- but not simply an arbitrary _degree_ of power, which is what we have now. Developers can ban anyone, anytime, and are answerable only to Jimbo. Sysops can ban an IP, and any other sysop can unban that IP.
But it's all arbitrary, unless there is a consensus on what rules these bannings are intended to enforce.
Wikipedia is the world's largest wiki, isn't it? When it's 10 times or 100 times the size, with 1,000 to 3,000 logged-in, daily contributors -- how will we manage then? My plea is for some way beyond the personal judgment of an elite, to maintain order, lest a self-perpetuating cabal develop that freezes out the very type of capable and devoted contributor it formed to protect.
I'm not hitting a single note. I'm not saying, just give me power. I'm not saying make everything a matter of dry, rigid rules.
But sheer anarchy tempered by three dudes with shotguns isn't my cup of tea either.
Help me out, here, man.
Ed Poor
But, my dear Cunctator, we have already given one percent of the users power: Jimbo and the developers can ban anyone, even a signed-in user. Ordinary sysops, such as myself, can ban only an IP.
There are 40 sysops, out of about 200 to 300 regular contributors. So our Dear Leader and Dictator For Life -- Jimbo -- and his royal bodyguards -- are that one percent. Sysops are about 20%. It's a two-tier power hierarchy.
Don't get my wrong, I have no quarrel with the benevolence of Mr. Wales. It is by his munificence that this project got started at all. Richard Stallman couldn't do it. FSF didn't hire a genius philosophy professor like Larry Sanger.
But we can't keep limping along by trusting the judgment of the top 1%. The authority needs to be delegated, lest the burden be too big. Recall the account of Moses and the 70 elders in Genesis.
Is SoftSecurity better than written guidelines? If so, clue me in.
Ed Poor
Hi elian, hi list!
> Although I normally oppose browser-sniffing, one solution would be to
make
> the welcome-text (and only this) language-dependent. Either this or in
> addition to it we could also adapt Magnus' suggestion to emphasize the
> preferred language-wikipedia.
I like this idea, and I also like the new design. (Just the search box
could be a bit further up.)
I think it's a good concept.
Kurt
"elian" skribis:
> Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> writes:
>
> > I personally think it would then be neat for
> > www.wikipedia.org to sniff the language setting of a
> > visitor's browser and then automatically direct them
> > to their language's welcome page if it exists -- if it
> > doesn't then it would bring them to the English
> > welcome page. I don't think that matching the language
> > a person's browser is in with a welcome page in the
> > same language is going to harm the user when several
> > other welcome pages in different languages are just a
> > click away. If this sniffing is done then all the
> > different languages can equally use www.wikipedia.org
> > for promotional purposes without having to explain why
> > the default is in English and how to get to their
> > language's welcome page.
>
> Although I normally oppose browser-sniffing, one solution would be to make
> the welcome-text (and only this) language-dependent. Either this or in
> addition to it we could also adapt Magnus' suggestion to emphasize the
> preferred language-wikipedia.
What do you think about a design like the one
at www.esperanto.net?
A _very_ short greeting message in your language
(in our case maybe a bit longer) then a list of
the supported languages, with your own language
highlighted.
Not to forget: When doing language-switching and
the preferred language is not available, try the
next ones from the list before falling back to
english. (There are webpages giving me english
instead of german since german is at place 2,
Esperanto at place 1.)
Paul