Larry,
good idea. I presume you wrote this before reading my response to your last mail, so here are my additions.
ISSUE 1. The problem or lack thereof.
PRO: There is indeed a serious problem now on Wikipedia. Many newbies (and some people who have been here for a while) brazenly violate the basic defining rules of our community, and presently, neither peer pressure, nor following violators around constantly, nor the occasional actual sanction seems to be solving this problem. Well-respected, clearly productive members of the community are driven away by having to deal with these people or such behaviors, and this is a really serious problem.
OTHER: I see two possible problems: a problem of simple, easy to discern vandalism and nonsense on the one hand and not so simple to evaluate violations of group policy on the other hand. I submit that vandalism is a significant and possibly growing problem that is not properly addressed, because, while it's simple to solve, too few people are involved in its solution (too few sysops), but increasing their number also increases the risks of abuse and error. The current administration is therefore not scalable.
I do consider the problem of regular users who break rules significant, but not urgent, and believe that our policy needs to focus on rehabilitation. I further submit that we do, in fact, need a decision process to decide which policies we want to enforce against regular users and how much leeway we want to give them, i.e. to which extent we want to rely on "soft security".
ISSUE 2. What to do about the problem, if anything.
OTHER: The Open Voting Option: Users can create two types of polls, inquiry polls (non binding) and policy polls (binding, with enforcement). Only a smaller group of users (still larger than the current admin group) can create policy polls, but the same group of users (e.g. everyone with >=n contributions) can vote in both types of polls. Policy polls can contain only specific types of options: ban user X, delete page Y, etc., but still follow the same discussion/voting principle.
Polls get their own namespace, and on the page where the poll is, users can also provide arguments for or against the different options. So I would go to [[Poll:Ban Lir]] and could see the different opinions and vote on them.
PRO CONTRA Lir has made many silly Lir has made xx valuable contributions and can't contributions and is trying be trusted to improve her behavior
VOTE
Yes [ ] No [ ] Don't care [ ] More info needed [ ] .. other standard options for policy polls? ..
Inquiry polls would allow the options to be defined freely and primarily be used to gather opinions in less extreme conflicts among reasonable persons. As voting styles, both first-past-the-post (winner takes all) and preferential voting are reasonably simple and should be supported, policy polls work better with fpp voting (clearly distinct options).
Recently added polls would be listed on a separate page like Recent_changes. The poll would be closed after a given timespan, defined by the person who creates it. For policy polls, depending on the type of action, we could set different threshold for whether we want to take it, e.g. banning an anon user should be easier than banning a signed in user. Minimum number of votes may be necessary, but not too high.
Possible problems: - we need to develop effective ways to deal with vote flooding in the long term (the system can be designed to repel basic attacks) - ??
Regards,
Erik