[Foundation-l] In reply to Virgilio's comments

Sun Apr 10 10:28:47 UTC 2011

In reply to Virgilio's comments:

1 "What would happen if all administrators, bureaucrats and so on were
told to take a hike"

I don't know about other projects, but within a few days, perhaps
hours the English Wikipedia would be trashed. With no admins to block
vandals or delete attack pages, and no pages that were admin only for
editing then not only would spammers and cyber bullies have a field
day and the most common templates would be magnets for penis picture
vandalism. Within a few days or at the most a week or two the
foundation and all the wiki mirrors would either have to go offline or
revert to the last "clean" version of the pedia in read only mode.

Then the foundation and or one or more other organisations would
reopen for editing having recruited a set of moderators. I'd hope that
 one of the forks would be an advertising free volunteer run wiki much
like Wikipedia and with many of the current administrators, I'd be
surprised if at least one of the forks wasn't commercially run,
advertising funded with paid moderators. Assuming there was some
notice of the decision to tell the admins to "take a hike" the
transition to a fork might be quite seamless, and the mirrors would
probably have the sense to stop taking updates from the moment you
handed Wikipedia over to the vandals.

2 What would happen if new requirements for being administrator and so
forth included assuming real identities,

Even if you paid them, a lot of people would baulk at disclosing their
real world identities when blocking paedophiles and the point of view
warriors of every contentious issue on the planet. There are sites
that went down the route of requiring all editors to identify, and
providing you aren't ambitious and don't want a large community that
can work. But I'm not aware of any site that has allowed anyone to
edit but required those who deal with its vandals to disclose their
real identity, more common I think is to allow anyone to create an
account but pay moderators whose real identity is known to the office
but who have role accounts for editing.

3 and a  set of real world qualifications.

Interesting but what qualifications would you require? Better
qualified people cost more and expect work that requires some of their
expertise. For deleting spam and attack pages and blocking vandals you
certainly don't need a high school diploma. IT literacy, written
fluency in the relevant language and some communication skill and the
ability to spot vandalism is required. I'm not aware of a relevant
real world qualification, but our existing though flawed request for
adminship process is effective at weeding out those without such
skills.

4 What it would be like to grant amnesty to all that are currently
banned and/or blocked.

It is just fine, providing we continue to only grant amnesty to those
who accept the terms of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Standard_offer
A blanket amnesty on other terms would only make sense if we wanted to
compete with Encyclopaedia dramatica.

5 What it would be like if there was separation of powers,

Not very different from today. At the moment the same admin can't
block someone and decline their unblock. If you had two different
groups, admins who blocked and another group of editors who considered
unblocks then things would be a little slower, especially when an
admin blocked someone by accident and had to get an unblocker to
reverse their mistake. So slower, more bureaucratic and less
efficient, but most editors would never notice a difference.

6 and secret balloting.

We use Secret ballots for Arbcom elections, it makes sense to do so
when you are deciding which 8 out of 13 candidates to support and you
wind up voting against some candidates because you think that others
are better for the role. We don't use secret ballots for appointing
administrators because, speaking from experience, rejected candidates
want to know why they were deemed unsuitable and what they need to
change or learn before trying again.

7 I wonder what it would be like if Wikimedia projects would borrow a
little more from democratic principles.

It would be much easier to change things, and we would all have to get
used to changes happening that didn't attempt to compromise with our
objections. In a democracy if 51% want to implement a change and 49%
prefer the status quo  then the 51% win and the 49% lose. In Wikimedia
both "sides" need to understand each other and try to come up with a
solution that achieves what the 51% wanted but without doing the
things that the 49% didn't want. In practice that isn't always
possible and sometimes you get a logjam where most people want change
but we don't have consensus for a particular change, however we are
only just over ten years old and I doubt if any of our logjams are
even as old as that. One of the interesting things for our next few
decades will be to see how successful we are at eventually getting
consensus solutions to problems that currently seem intractable.
Personally I'm optimistic and think that a measurable minority of the
problems that currently evade a consensus solution will have been
resolved even before the end of our second decade.

8 Scary thoughts aren't they?

No. But thanks for posing them.

Regards

WereSpielChequers

> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2011 05:43:41 +0100
> From: "Virgilio A. P. Machado" <vam at fct.unl.pt>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <mailman.35468.1302418463.28183.foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
>
> I know that nobody has the guts to do it, but I wonder... I wonder
> what would happen if all administrators, bureaucrats and so on where
> told to take a hike. What would happen if new requirements for being
> administrator and so forth included assuming real identities, and a
> set of real world qualifications. What it would be like to grant
> amnesty to all that are currently banned and/or blocked. What it
> would be like if there was separation of powers, and secret
> balloting. I wonder what it would be like if Wikimedia projects would
> borrow a little more from democratic principles. Yes, I wonder...
> Scary thoughts aren't they? No surprise though, coming from someone
> who is the scourge of countless Wikimedia projects and a troll
> according to many.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Virgilio A. P. Machado
>