[WikiEN-l] Revealed! Why the community is on crack

[Phil Sandifer]

To my mind, you can start to see the cracks in 2004-05 or so - when  
policy formation stopped being possible because you couldn't get a  
75-80% vote on anything. (This was back in the days when this was how  
we did policy formation) Attempted policies on trolling and blocking  
for personal attacks failed. That is to say, we lacked a key element  
of a constitution - rules on how to adapt. And, worse, the lack  
became a problem precisely because we had too damn many people,  
rendering it nigh-impossible to come up with one.

And indeed we haven't really come up with one. Policy formation is a  
madhouse. We can chart the various flavors of madness it's gone  
through if we want, but that's not really the point.

To my mind, the telling example in the essay is LambdaMOO. The  
wizards need to come back.

-Phil

On May 2, 2007, at 5:37 AM, David Gerard wrote:

> I am amazed there are people who haven't read this:
>
> http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
>
> The problem with Internet-based project is that they form groups of
> humans, and a group is its own worst enemy. That's a marvellous essay
> by Clay Shirky (who's on the Wikimedia Advisory Board for good
> reason), and when I read it I was just nodding my head and going "yep"
> over and over. An Internet community has a life cycle. It starts, it's
> good for a while, it chokes itself or falls away. I've seen this
> happen over and over.
>
> The problem comes when the community is not an end in itself but is
> attached to a purpose: it starts fouling the purpose. We're seeing
> that on Wikipedia. That is, English Wikipedia's interesting community
> problems are a wider emergent phenomenon than just Wikipedia or Jimmy
> Wales having done something wrong.
>
> (Woe is us when flooded with people for whom this is their first
> online community and who haven't experienced the cycle even once. We
> have enough trouble enculturating Usenet refugees and their … robust …
> interaction style.)
>
> Larry Sanger is trying to work around this on Citizendium, as advised
> by Shirky's main source, Bion's "Experiences In Groups": group
> structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order, parliamentary
> procedure, etcetera. The question then is how much emergent bad
> behaviour you can suppress without suppressing the emergent good
> behaviour.
>
> Shirky says "Constitutions are a necessary component of large,
> long-lived, heterogenous groups." I've long spoken of Wikipedia's
> fundamental policies — neutrality, verifiability, no original
> research; assume good faith, no personal attacks, don't bite the
> newbies — as a constitution, and said that any process that violates
> them must be thrown out. The catch being there's not yet a way to
> enforce that.
>
> One thing Shirky strongly points out: "The third thing you need to
> accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some
> situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite
> common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one
> person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea
> voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in." You
> would probably believe the outrage when I applied the phrase "one
> moron one vote" to Requests for Adminship. That, by the way, is the
> prime example on English Wikipedia at present of a group that's being
> its own worst enemy. I think it's worse than Articles for Deletion.
>
> (And you'll see this 2003 essay speaks of Wikipedia as a project
> that's avoided that one. Whoops.)
>
> How to keep the community focused on the point of the exercise? What
> level of control does one apply to keep on track without killing off
> the liveliness?
>
>
> - d.
>
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