Maury Markowitz wrote:
Well color me sceptical. Many of the problems you
mention on the web page seem inherant to any large group of humans. I don't see how
changing the rules can, of itself, address the fact that we all have opinions and we all
consider them to be important. As this appears to be a major concern of the proposal, let
me address this directly...
"Pleasantness and respectfulness will be effectively enforced on Wikipendium"
The concepts of "pleasantness" and "respectfulness" are very much
open to interpretation - and thus opinion. How are we to decide if a comment is simply a
poke-in-the-ribs for fun, or a seriously nasty note? This is often difficult in "real
life", let alone the limited bandwidth of a text based media.
Perhaps it's just me, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that there can be
a set of rules that can address this. Instead, it seems that a flexible case-by-case basis
with many viewpoints is the only way to ensure that one person's view, the
"constables" as you call them, doesn't become overarching. I believe the
system on the Wikipedia had demonstrated itself to be workable beyond my own belief.
A word of advice: I had a friend who ran a very successful MUD about a decade ago. It was
created out of the ashes of another MUD with rules very much like what you are proposing.
This first attempt died a hasty death. Their second attempt was a free-for-all with
self-policing by the members. It ran for years.
I don't want to sound like a downer, but in my limited experience, more rules
generally makes things worse, not better. Generally the rules themselves become the points
of argument. You can certainly see this on the Wikipedia, and I have argued on several
occasions for re-writing some of them to be based more on common sense and less on the
letter of the law.
I very much agree with this analysis. It is hard to conceive
that a
saviour will come along and lead the true-believers to the promised
land. They will be lucky to find that peace in the promised land lasts
as long as five minutes. The underlying ideals are a common thread in
many such religious or political movements. Most of these devolve into
either tyranny or ineffectuality.
Rule-making too often dwells on the relatively rare extreme cases.
Devoting our efforts constructively to what kind of a project we want is
a lot more fruitful than wasting a lot of time arguing about what to do
with the occasional saboteur. It's easy for the builder to see these
detailed rules as a threat to fundamental freedoms. It is too easy for
these rules to be trotted out in situations that were not imagined when
they were written.
Ec