Dear Wikitechies,
Although I'm fairly new to Wikipedia and WikiMedia, I've been interested in and working on ideas relating to participatory/democratic collaborative systems for a while. I happened across Marc Girod's suggestion on the "A Better Wikipedia" page for adding some form of branch support as an alternative to content freezing or other similar "hard security" measures. Since this was right in line with some of my own thinking recently, I decided to invest a little time to try to work out the idea in a little more detail and explore some of the design issues and challenges. So I've written up one possible, preliminary design and put it on my user page, here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Brynosaurus
The most important goals this design tries hard to embody are (a) providing a clean, robustly, and democratic solution to most of the existing edit war and vandalism issues, and (b) being as simple (from the user's perspective) and minimally intrusive as possible to the standard wiki workflow, especially for the vast majority of wiki pages that aren't highly controversial.
This is somewhat ambitious and long-term stuff, not something I'm expecting anyone to jump up and implement immediately or slip into a minor release. I'm interested in working on it myself if there is support for the idea, but for starters I'd just like to gauge interest and get some initial feedback.
Thanks very much! Bryan
I strongly support explorations of new ideas like this, but I caution that many people (and I am among them) are very skeptical of _voting_ as a solution to wiki social issues. Voting brings with it a whole host of incentive problems, many of them much worse than the incentive problems that we face today.
Voting can be a reasonable way to resolve issues for which absolutely no other solution can be found. But I very much doubt that introducing a system where people vote on article content is a good idea.
Let's imagine that 90% of the people editing a particular page are of one opinion, and 10% are of a different opinion. So long as the participants are all reasonable and friendly, this poses no obstacle to the production of an article that is satisfactory to all -- this is the normal wiki way of producing quality encyclopedic content.
The majority has no choice but to respect the viewpoint of the minority, because the minority can always just _edit the article_.
If branching and voting are introducted, we've destroyed the incentive structure that makes wiki work. The 90% now has no reason to respect the viewpoint of the minority, because the vote is so heavily one-sided that the minority can be safely ignored.
Voting is not necessarily the enemy of compromise -- but it certainly *can* be, if used carelessly.
--Jimbo
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 08:42:44 -0700 "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Let's imagine that 90% of the people editing a particular page are of one opinion, and 10% are of a different opinion. So long as the participants are all reasonable and friendly, this poses no obstacle to the production of an article that is satisfactory to all -- this is the normal wiki way of producing quality encyclopedic content.
The majority has no choice but to respect the viewpoint of the minority, because the minority can always just _edit the article_.
That sounds very idealistic, but is it realistic? Do you see this happen on any pages? Hardly. For one thing, there's usually not 10 people working on a page, but 2 or 3, who either agree or do not. And secondly, either people want to compromise, or they do not. If they do, they'll vote for compromise solutions too. If they don't, we just get the normal Wikipedia way of giving the page to the person with either most audacity or the longest breath.
I really don't see why 9 people voting for A and 1 for B, then choosing A is a worse way of getting compromise than 9 people reverting B to A and 1 reverting A to B, and then choose B when that 1 person happens to be the most determined and A otherwise.
If branching and voting are introducted, we've destroyed the incentive structure that makes wiki work. The 90% now has no reason to respect the viewpoint of the minority, because the vote is so heavily one-sided that the minority can be safely ignored.
And what is the incentive now? I'd rather go along with the majority than with the person who happens to be loudest about it, or who happens to make the first page on the subject, or who has the strongest opinion.
Andre Engels
Andre Engels wrote:
The majority has no choice but to respect the viewpoint of the minority, because the minority can always just _edit the article_.
That sounds very idealistic, but is it realistic? Do you see this happen on any pages?
Yes, I see it everywhere, all the time. It is the primary mode of operation on the website.
Hardly. For one thing, there's usually not 10 people working on a page, but 2 or 3, who either agree or do not. And secondly, either people want to compromise, or they do not. If they do, they'll vote for compromise solutions too.
From a game-theoretic point of view, this is not likely to be true.
People are often *willing* to compromise, if the system makes it necessary, but are equally *willing* to force the majority view, if the system makes it possible.
I really don't see why 9 people voting for A and 1 for B, then choosing A is a worse way of getting compromise than 9 people reverting B to A and 1 reverting A to B, and then choose B when that 1 person happens to be the most determined and A otherwise.
But this last is very rarely the way articles are edited. It is a reasonable description of at least *some* edit wars, but even *most* edit wars do not work in this way for long. There is no stable equilibrium until the A's and the B's find a way to "go meta", and that's what normally happens.
And what is the incentive now?
If you want your text to survive, then whether you are in the majority or the minority, you must find a way to present it such that all sides are satisfied. That is _the_ central incentive in the Wikipedia system.
And this is why Wikipedia is as good as it is, because the software forces people to live together, and has no mechanisms to permit anyone (majority or minority) to force through something which is not a compromise.
You can find clear examples of this in action on virtually every article on the site, even articles where edit wars have broken out and gone on for a very long time, due to some people refusing to compromise. But in most cases, even cases with edit wars, the fact that it takes a long time to reach equilibrium is natural, not dysfunctional, because it can be very hard to find a wording which really is neutral.
It really is quite easy to find good examples of how our steady avoidance of voting on articles has forced people to compromises that would not have otherwise been reached.
--Jimbo
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