[WikiEN-l] Jimbo's political theory

[Jimmy Wales]

We get to directly choose procedures and institutions, not outcomes.
That's very important to understand.  Outcomes are driven by
procedures and institutions and sometimes in ways that are unexpected.

I think that we have consensus about the kinds of outcomes that we
want.  We want procedures and institutions that are encouraging of
good behaviors and discouraging of bad behaviors.  We want procedures
and institutions that prevent the rise of an ideological faction to
control the content of the articles in any political/ideological way.
We want procedures and institutions that are transparent, open,
flexible, reasonable, and which have a minimum of gamesmanship.  We
want procedures and institutions that are scalable and that don't
depend on me as a bottleneck.

The trick is in figuring out what those institutions and procedures
should be.  This will be a trial and error process.

I think that arbitration is working, but agree with those who point
out that it isn't what many of us envisioned as arbitration.  It's
more of an independent judiciary panel deciding punishments on a
case-by-case basis.

I think that mediation has mixed success, but not because of the
intentions or the people involved, but because we've made something of
a structural error.  Too many people aren't taking mediation
seriously, preferring to go straight to arbitration.  The fact that
mediators can't really do anything other than talk sweetly is probably
the main issue.

I'm putting a lot of thought into these issues, and listening very
carefully and seriously to what everyone is saying.  I expect that we
will be tweaking the system to a degree to try to alleviate some of
the problems we've seen.

--Jimbo