[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their active numbers

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 12:45 AM 6/1/2010, David Goodman wrote:
>Neither they nor anyone else   knows how to do this at our scale in as
>open a structure as ours.

While I understand the opinion, how do you know that? Isn't it a tad 
limiting to believe that nobody knows how to deal with our problem? 
Perhaps the expertise exists, but we haven't been looking for it or 
connecting with it, or, worse, rejecting it when it's suggested, out 
of a *belief* that it couldn't work, but without actual experience.

The model I know that worked, and spectacularly, was Alcoholics 
Anonymous. Grew rapidly. The scale became *very* large, particularly 
in terms of active members, most registered accounts on Wikipedia, I 
suspect, are inactive. Now, AA certainly is also different.

I merely suggest that, with AA, some specific organizational concepts 
were developed, from the study of the history of organizations, and 
were expressed and became solidly accepted traditions that are 
actually practiced, and the result was a highly unified organization 
without central control. Branfman et al call these "starfish 
organizations," because you can cut them up and they re-form from the 
pieces, and he distinguishes them from "spider organizations," where 
if you cut off the head, the organization dies.

Most of the recent thinking in this area looks to hybrid 
organizations. AA, as an example, has a central office, which is 
operated by a nonprofit corporation with a board that is partly 
elected by the World Service Conference and partly self-appointed. 
The analogy here would be the WMF, Inc. However, to take this analogy 
further, Wikipedia would be a collection of independent "meetings" 
that voluntarily associate, and membership in each meeting would be 
open, self-selected. The resemblance stops when people who are *not* 
members of a meeting impose control over the meeting. That isn't done 
with AA. Period. Yet, without any central control, people can go to 
an AA meeting almost anywhere and will *mostly* find the same 
consensus, but it's not an oppressive consensus (usually! AA members 
are still human). Members are welcome to disagree, and express the 
disagreement, and they won't be kicked out. Unless they actually 
disrupt the meeting directly, and I've not heard of it. I'm not an 
alcoholic, though, so I've only been to open meetings, not to closed 
ones, only open to alcoholics.

>Most ideas tend to retreat towards one form
>or another of centralized control over content or to division of the
>project to reduce the scale.

My own work suggests continuing the ad hoc local organization that 
does, in fact, work very well, but moving away from centralized 
control imposed coercively, distributing control, perhaps to a series 
of "Volumes" that are organized by topic area. But what I really 
propose is that process be established for the development and 
discovery of consensus with efficiency. It does require that 
discussion be reduced in scale, and there are lots of traditional 
ways to do that, known to work. I.e, discussion takes place in a 
hierarchy of discussions. Classically, a committee system. The 
committees merely collect evidence and argument, organizing it and 
making recommendations, they do not control. But if they do their 
work well, their reports will be adopted centrally by whatever 
process exists there, or, if something was overlooked, it will be 
sent back to committee for further work in the light of what happened 
"higher up."

The ad hoc Wikipedia process does this, but with informality, for the 
most part, and the structure that it would fit into has not been 
completed. Probably the "top level" would be an elected 
representative body, and for that to function to maximize consensus, 
it needs to be thoroughly representative, and my work with voting 
systems leads me to understand how to do that efficiently and 
thoroughly. It could be amazingly simple.

 From the AA analogy, this body is actually only advisory, not 
exercising sovereign control. It would advise the community and the 
WMF. The WMF has legal control over the servers and the name 
"Wikipedia." But advice developed through consensus process is 
probably more powerful than centralized control.

>  That it is possible to organize well
>enough to do  what we've done on our scale, is proven by the
>result--an enormously useful product for the world in general. That we
>could do better is probable, since the current structure is almost
>entirely ad hoc, but there is no evidence as to what will work better.

I would not say "no evidence," but I'll certainly acknowledge that 
there is no proof. One of the problems is that the current structure 
has become so entrenched and so self-preserving that experiments, 
even conducted in ways that could not do damage (other than perhaps 
wasting the time of those who choose to participate in them), are 
crushed. WP:PRX was simply an experiment, it consisted only of a file 
structure, and established no control at all, no change in policy or 
guidelines. It did not establish voting, much less proxy voting as 
was claimed. It would not have given power to puppet masters, most 
notably because the last thing a puppet master wants to do is call 
attention directly to the connection.

>Intensely democratic structures have one characteristic form of
>repression of individuality, and controlled structures another.

And then there are hybrids.

>The
>virtue of division is to provide smaller structures adapted to
>different methods, so that individuals can find one that is tolerable,
>but this loses the key excitment of working together on something
>really large.

Unless the individual structures have a voluntary coordinating superstructure.

>My own view is that we should treat this as an experiment, and pursue
>it on its own lines as far as it takes us.

Sure. But, of course, there is WP:NOT. Which sometimes might be 
equivalent to WP:IS. Since, generally, Wikipedia is *also* many of 
the things that it supposedly is not.


>On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
><abd at lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> > if the
> > structure were functional. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the
> > founders of Wikipedia did not know how to put together a project that
> > could maintain unity and consensus when the scale became large.
>
>
>
>--
>David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
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