[WikiEN-l] Superusers?

[Ian Woollard]

On 27/08/2010, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27 August 2010 02:01, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I would expect that that could be done, but I'd have to think about
>> it. But if the process allows people not to check their biases at the
>> door, then that's a problem in the process.
>
> Every process allows that. That's because you can't make effective
> rules against stupidity or bad faith.

The point about random juries is that the stupidity and bad faith
tends to average out (the deviation from the average goes with the
square root of the number of participants). So to a fair degree you
can.

> You'd need to show that assuming good faith is not sufficient, and
> that the process actively breaks it. (That *should* be enough, but
> sadly isn't IME.)

We don't actually want to have to assume good faith, ideally we'd
prefer to encourage good faith, and ideally measure the degree of good
faith or make it so that the odd person not exhibiting it doesn't
really matter that much.

But sure, if for some reason it turns out that juries are selected
from and mostly made up of bad actors, then probably nothing can be
done. Some parts of the Wikipedia (i.e. noticeboards) do seem to work
scarily like that, they self-select for people with a particular
mindset.

> - d.

-- 
-Ian Woollard