[WikiEN-l] Community Sanction

[George Herbert]

On 11/27/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:

> The profile of Wikipedia is now such that we have a significant number
> of aggressively tendentious editors.  These go well beyond the
> occasional "characters" like SPUI and cause massive wasted time and
> effort.
>

Having them is just an indicator of the scope of Wikipedia; if you look back
at all the prior Internet interactive projects of note, they have all
attracted malcontents of various sorts over time.  Success attracts them.

The question is what is done about it.  The best solution I saw was benign
dictatorships where someone in power just booted troublemakers, and was
trusted by the rest to not boot good guys, and where social pressure
functioned and kept good guys having really bad days from becoming
troublemakers requiring the boot.

I don't think WP can do that; we have a form of that, but the scope is so
large that it's not a benign dictator; it's a benign oligarchy, with its own
internal politics and dynamics within the group and between the group and
elements of the group and the "normal editors" outside the group.  And it's
not just a benign oligarchy of uninvolved people; the admins largely but by
no means completely overlap the really active editors, which means that
active editor admin / active editor non-admin conflicts happen all the
time.  The successful benign dictators I have seen stayed out of the day to
day fray.  We can't possibly do that here.

I don't suggest replacing the current mechanism; I lack any good concepts
for a better approach.  It's just a hard problem, by the nature of the
project.  It's probably going to continue to be a hard problem, eventually
driving good people to frustration and exit from the project at a moderate
rate.  Avoiding admin burnout is going to be important over time.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com