[WikiEN-l] Re: Transition to WikiDemocracy

[Sheldon Rampton]

Ed Poor wrote:

>Wikipedia has grown so large that it is no longer possible to rely on
>so-called soft security.

I agree. Here's my solution:

(1) Require people to register, providing a verifiable email address 
that is not yahoo or hotmail, as a precondition for contributing. 
(Alternately, restrict the NUMBER of contributions that a 
non-registered individual can contribute within a 24-hour period.)

(2) Unambiguously authorize sysops to take immediate, unilateral 
action against egregious abusers (with clear definitions of 
"egregious abuse").

(3) Use mediation/arbitration as both an appeals process for users 
who feel that have been wrongfully banned, and as a method of dealing 
with disputes and allegations of abuse that don't meet the standard 
of "egregious abuse."

Finally, I think we should think seriously about the "democracy" part 
of "WikiDemocracy." Democracy is a system of governance. It is not 
anarchy. There are rules and rulers. It's a better system generally 
than dictatorship, but it isn't simply laissez-faire.

I've been doing a bit of experimentation lately with using wikis to 
facilitate decision-making within some nonprofit organizations in 
which I am active. In that context, I've come to the conclusion that 
wikis should be used primarily for facilitation of the process rather 
than for decision-making per se. For example, I sit on a committee 
that makes decisions about lending policy and loans to low-income 
communities in Nicaragua. We're going to try to use a wiki as an way 
to formulate and revise proposals, but once a proposal has been 
formulated, we'll still need to the committee to vote up or down on 
it in the tradition one person-one vote manner.

As a practical matter, Wikipedia doesn't have a way of enabling 
voting by the entire community of Wikipedians, but there are a couple 
of reasonable approximations that we could attempt:

(1) Have Jimbo appoint a governing committee. This would inevitably 
be a non-representative subset of the entire community, but having 
Jimbo as our benevolent dictator is also non-representative. The 
advantage of a governing committee is that it could be SOMEWHAT more 
representative of the entire committee than just Jimbo by himself, 
and it could also take some of the work off his shoulders.

(2) Establish a voting system, through which a large subset of the 
entire Wikipedia community is authorized to vote. Obviously we'll 
need some way to exclude spam-voting by anonymous abusers, but if we 
gave a vote to everyone who has supplied a unique and verified email 
address, that would be a close enough approximation to universal 
enfranchisement for practical purposes.

(3) Use the voting system to create a "parliament" of elected 
representatives, whose members are charged with setting policies on 
behalf of the entire community.

(4) Alternately, we could try to develop a system of "policy juries," 
through which everyone occasionally gets asked at random to 
participate in policy decisions. For a discussion of how policy 
juries work, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarchy

  --Sheldon Rampton