[WikiEN-l] Jimbo's political theory

[Ray Saintonge]

I'll need to wait to respond to some very good comments here.  Wives 
simply don't understand such important things when they're trying to get 
us away for the weekend. :-)

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>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
>