Tokerboy :Ed Poor

I originally only wanted to respond to two posts. First of all, I like the Cunctster being a prick--he's a vaccine against groupthink because no decision will ever be unanimous as long as he is here--makes me wonder if that's his goal. Many CEOs and team leaders and the like secretly designate one board/team member to disagree on every decision, because otherwise groups tend to accept the first even remotely viable option presented.

With that said, he can be a cock. (a throbbing, monster one, even)

:I might be an anarchist, but if I see a gang of kids :going down the :street, methodically knocking out car windshields :with baseball bats -- :I'm calling the cops. And I want them to have :handcuffs, mace and guns. :Sometimes having a police force is the lesser of two :evils.

Bad vandals destroy cars, property and occasionally people, but a corrupt police force doesn't stop any of this and tears apart the community. The best solution is to have the community oversee the police force.

:Now, I'm not dismissing the risk that "law and order" :can turn into :fascism. Hitler is ever on my mind. But have you ever :lived in a :gang-controlled neighborhood?

I've lived in several, and it depends on the gang and the city. In Baltimore, for example, gangs are indeed dangerous and to be stayed away from. In Richmond, organized crime gangs exist, and fight with each other, but generally leave others alone. In some cities, some gangs have done more to help the local community than governmental programs. The Mafia is the same way.

Anyway, we're not discussing organized crime here, but I think it's a valid analogy. My solution is below.

:With no legitimate authority, mob rule develops. With :excessive :authority, dictatorship ensues. What are we to do?

I know exactly what to do, and everybody who disagrees with me is clearly wrong and should go live in the desert for forty years and forty nights and ponder the depths of your wrongossity and incorrectitude.

I think we should divide the controversial powers up. Currently sysop status is not difficult to achieve; that's fine and wonderful since it means more people to delete silly vandalism and ban such IPs. I propose separating this from the position of moderator. I don't know if we need/it's possible to do this through the software, but I think it would work anyway.

Sysop: delete obviously vandalized articles, delete pages to make way for a move, ban anonymous IPs if necessary. If there is _any doubt_ as to whether a change should be considered vandalism, refer the matter to a moderator. Moderator: powers of sysop above, but intervenes in edit wars and disagreements if a user or sysop asks (or if the moderator simply sees one developing). The moderator tries to get the situation cooled down, and the argument resolved in one way or another. I'd say the standard for freezing an article is 1: if an actual edit war has erupted and 2: the article should be frozen at the state it was before the war, or with no text at all and a reference to the talk page. I'd also suggest allowing both sides to write an article (or a section) from their POV, and then having one or more moderators combine the two.

If someone does not agree with the moderator's decision, some sort of court should be established where a user can complain about a moderator's actions, and other moderators and/or sysops can discuss the decision and whether or not it was justified.

Moderators should be chosen through some sort of anonymous nomination system. Any signed-in user can nominate another user and when a person has been nominated five times (by different users), he can be made a moderator. Alternatively, perhaps a person must be a sysop for a month or two before becoming a moderator.

I think regardless of the merit of what I propose above, I do believe we should have a Bill of Rights of sorts for users without any special status (i.e. not even signed in) to more effectively guarantee that abuse will not occur.

1:Users have the right to edit any page, except for specifically protected ones or articles temporarily frozen because an edit war was developing 2:Users have the right to access a forum to complain of abuse of power

Those are the only two I can think of right now. I have a good bit of experience in trying to spread out too little power among too many people, which is the problem we're having now, in one of my old jobs. The reason this is occuring is because sysops have two roles: general maintenance and moderation. The power for general maintenance should be spread out, because if the basic rule that only clearcut vandalism and nonsense can be deleted is followed, this can only help the wikipedia grow. I think that in 99% of cases, a sysop ruling to delete a page/ban an IP (currently) is simply because of vandalism. It's the minority of cases where judgement, and potential abuse of power, comes into play. If 99% of the problems is one discrete type, then 99% of the enforcement power should be directed towards those problems, and the other 1% where judgement comes into play should be considered separately, because it is a separate problem.

Tokerboy

PS: It has been decided that we will, one way or another, upload fair use material like album covers, right? I should continue to upload such things as needed, right? I didn't mean to raise a ruckus, brouhaha or shenanigans--I was just fed up trying to describe psychedelic album covers ("There's a woman... probably... with much... bizareness around her, and a star... or maybe it's a koala bear") and I saw others uploading video covers.

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