Misplaced Pages

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Agreement

I agree. Maybe not in all the details, but Misplaced Pages would definitely benefit from a more enlightened governance model. The lack of meaningful leadership around here leads to a dissatisfying status quo. Governance by committee of whoever shows up at a random discussion page is very challenging at best and self-destructive at worst. Dragons flight (talk) 17:02, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I as well support a change. Policy development and review is not being handled well in our current system. FloNight♥♥♥ 17:10, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Agree as well. Some sort of policy creation and review board (government, whatever), sounds like a good idea, but selecting individuals for it and term lengths could be problematic. John Carter (talk) 17:19, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I have also thought about something like this. I think it's a necessary step, as the community grows larger. The m:Foundation issues include a principle that the wiki mechanism is used for content, but there is no reason that policies also must be written in that way. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:06, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

This is a very good idea. We need a body of editors to act as some sort of a legislative body. STORMTRACKER 94 12:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I've been thinking for a while that sooner or later we're going to need something like this - I think we're probably at the stage where we should start serious discussing it. --Tango (talk) 15:47, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I like this, although I think the group of people should be smaller. It needs to be a deliberative body in order to work, and 50 is too many. 15 would make more sense. There is a wide set of fundamental changes built into this proposal, though, that I would like to see outlined. The use of a majority rather than consensus method, elections to essentially establish a project authority, a switch to policies that cannot be edited by the community at large, the creation of a new tier of user and new set of user rights (maybe). What are the wider effects of these changes? How would the policy process interact with Jimbo and the Board? I'm assuming even this group would be forbidden from editing WP:NPOV? This body should absolutely be separate from the Arbitration Committee, which should remain as the body that interprets and enforces policy and handles decisions about private matters etc. Avruch 16:12, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Avruch seems to postulating a "constitution" of unchangable policies, which is probably a good idea. I would personally object to having the number being too small though, because we will have to take into account that very few if any of use are competent to speak reasonably about every possible policy set forward. Having a large enough body to ensure that there are enough people knowledgable about the subject being discussed would probably be more important than having too small a number. I do imagine that there would eventually be informal, de facto "committees" on most of the major policy areas, made up of editors familiar with that particular aspect of wikipedia, and that might be the best way to go. John Carter (talk) 16:21, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

A constitution of unchangeable principles might be good, but the actual policies need to be editable (WP:NPOV has been edited nearly 100 times in the last month alone - and not all of those were reverted .) I like the idea of a committee system - I don't think you can get good representation with only 15 people, and there's also no room for people going inactive, with 50 it doesn't matter if a handful aren't around for a particular vote. --Tango (talk) 18:04, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Let's at least drop the number to 24 or 30 (note, divisible by three per proposed 3 tiered tranche system). 50 is just still way too many. Yes, we want to deal with absenteeism, but that can be done with 2 or 3 dozen. Also, there's nothing preventing this group from allowing others to help out. One need not be elected to a committee to voice an opinion. Talk pages abound. - jc37 19:18, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I think having at least 50 is important, it will help to ensure that things can still continue even allowing for the almost inevitable inactivity by some. It will also enable a cross-section of the wikipedia community to be represented (different views/opinions etc.) and will help prevent those who disagree with decisions made from saying 'we (larger number) oppose/support this proposal so why is this (smaller number) forcing such a policy upon us'. Davewild (talk) 19:27, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Part of my concern is considering how labour intensive arbcom elections are. Incidentally, 10 a year (30) would make this group exactly double the members of arbcom. Can we presume that 4 or 5 times that amount will "run"? As I recall, the last Arbcomm elections had only maybe 8 or 9 which even made the numeric threshhold. Let's not get so big that we're just filling seats to fill seats. - jc37 19:23, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I understand and agree with your concerns. The only reason I would at this point want to keep the number fluid is because we still haven't figured out exactly what they'd all be doing in the first place. If members of ArbCom were to be permitted to join, that might make us want to change the existing totals. Addition of any other groups in any way might as well. And we haven't even discussed the number of specialized fields might be involved. We might, perhaps, find that if there were to be specialization (maybe direct election to a "Conduct" committee, or any other possible groups for example), it might actually increase the number of candidates by more clearly defining their primary role. After we define what it is they'll all be doing, we'll have a better idea how many of them there should be. John Carter (talk) 19:30, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

3 tranches with yearly elections would mean 3 year terms - that's far too long. It doesn't work for ArbCom (most people resign before completely their term), so even if it was a good idea to have people on the assembly that long we wouldn't actually be able to. 30 people with 10 elected every 6 months might work, although I would prefer slightly more (48, say). --Tango (talk) 21:41, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I strongly support this proposal (and wish I'd noticed it earlier). Misplaced Pages has three options:

1. Allowing its policy to continue to stagnate,
2. Having the Foundation step in to impose structure on the community,
3. Having the community come up with something like this.

Of these, the third is by far the most preferable. Of course, I imagine this will fail for the same reasons as it's needed, which leaves us a choice of the first two. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 12:48, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Policy vs. guideline

Sounds interesting, but I think we should still retain the community's ability to affect guidelines.

(for brevity, I'll call my suggestion "Policy Review (PRV)".)

So have it so that all new community designed "policies" start out as guidelines, and this new policy review committee (or whatever we call it) only determines if these guidelines should become actual "policy". In addition, they should probably have the ability to review all current policies and see if any should be deprecated to guidelines, and whether guidelines should be deprecated to essays.

So it would be a case of someone nominating a guideline (or essay) for review. Run like a combination of a DRV and arbcomm. The elected committee (let's say for now that they're elected the same way as arbcom) would would discuss, with everyone else discussing on the talk page, with the PRV committee result found the same way as an arbcomm ruling.

Obviously the details in format or whatever are changeable, but this at least illustrates how it could work.

Essentially the committee would be:

• Reviewing a policy for demotion
• Reviewing a guideline for promotion or demotion
• Reviewing an essay for promotion

So no individual editor would be able to mark a page "policy", it would require either PRV, or some other group to do so (such as the wikimedia project).

But anyone could mark a page an essay, and anyone could mark a page a guideline, while knowing that doing so may have the page nominated for PRV.

What do you think? - jc37 17:58, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a variation on the standard "bill nomination" model, which I think might work. There might be a question regarding a necessary new policy regarding a subject which doesn't even have guidelines yet, and various legal or otehr situations could result in the need for a quick creation of a new policy. We might also want to specify a specific number of days for comment on a proposed policy or policy removal before a vote would take place, but that should be relatively easy to arrive at. John Carter (talk) 18:03, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I think this would be unnecessary makework on an already broken system. I'd prefer to do away with the misleading policy, guideline and essay templates, and basically rank project namespace pages by some other ranking system. (A ranking system with just 3 ranks is never going to be very fine grained).

The best proposal I've heard so far is to rank pages by number of pages linking to them (compare the old google pagerank algorithm).

This can be done by a computer, and saves valuable human time. :-)

--Kim Bruning (talk) 08:03, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Interpret the policies

It just occurred to me that this would also be useful as a group "at the disposal of Arbcomm". So that if arbcomm is looking for an interpretation of a policy/guideline/essay, this group could present a "finding". This would allow arbcomm to focus more on arbitration and less on policy interpretation. To clarify, PRV would interpret policy, Arbcomm would interpret actions of an editor. And to do so, would rely on PRV to present an interpretation of policy, when wanted/needed. (Others can argue out whether arbcom is "bound" to the PRV's interpretation or not.) - jc37 18:12, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Need identified but policy not written

One of the biggest problems that we have is that Misplaced Pages is lacking policy in some areas despite a need for them. Over the last several years, the Arbitration Committee has advised the Community of the need for several new policies or policy re-writes but the Community does not seem able to do it in a manner that gain consensus. FloNight♥♥♥ 18:13, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

So you would imagine this committee not only blessing existing or new guidelines, but also creating new policy de novo? I'm not opposed to this at all, just clarifying. I think that is probably a good idea, but when it is completely new, or via a arbcom request should the community have input, or only the indirect input of voting? - cohesion 15:09, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

My personal preference would be something like the existing set-up of ArbCom, where there is a page where initially everyone can make their comments regarding a proposed policy, including changes to phrasing, and where later the designated policy shapers can work out any further details regarding the exact phrasing. Allowing separate pages for both community input (particularly before the final consideration, but also during it) and one for the more formal revision/ratification process among the designated individuals, has seemed to work fairly well so far. John Carter (talk) 15:18, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

On a practical level, I'd certainly think that any policy-making body would receive community input in the form of direct comments in any case. New policy—whether proposed by a member of the committee or by another editor—would presumably go through the normal public proposal & feedback phases; the only real difference would be that the elected body would make the final decision on whether said proposal (or some version of it) would become policy or not. Kirill 15:18, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Maybe more changes

Right now, ArbCom functions basically as our judicial system. Generally, a government will have executive, legislative, judicial, and enforcement entities. We already have some corporate execs, and this proposal would function effectively as our legislative wing. Some could argue that all admins are in the enforcement wing, although I think, if we had enough interest, it might be a good idea to specifically name a number of editors as specific "enforcers", similar to many governments' police.
Additionally, we could probably stand for our "lawyers", or topical or conduct experts, as well. These wouldn't necessarily be appointed or elected positions, but rather like expert witnesses individuals called in by the ArbCom as informed, neutral parties knowledgable about a specific topic under discussion. These individuals might even be, if in any way specifically designated, the effective "content judges", although that might be going too far.
Lastly, I note that there is an extant proposal for ombudsmen at WP:OmbCom which might be relevant to this proposal as well.
We definitely do neep some sort of way of expediting the creation of policy. Maybe it might be possible to create !voting periods for certain proposals which haven't been rejected, so that there could some at least potentially binding policies in necessary areas. Would I be right in thinking that maybe the bureaucrats would be the ones to decide on the final results, possibly based on a required percentage of the !votes on a given subject? John Carter (talk) 18:14, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

That would be a first step, perhaps. I suspect that referendum-style voting is going to become impractical (if it hasn't already) because of drive-by voting. A fixed pool of votes (as in an elected body) allows a proposal to undergo modifications during the voting process until it can garner sufficient support to pass. With an open pool of votes, however, there's nothing to cause early voters to reconsider after modifications, and each modification conceptually invalidates all the earlier votes without any real provision for restoring them. Kirill 05:49, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

The chicken or the egg

I have not thought about all details, but I agree with the general analysis: Basically, it seems that there is no controlled way at this time how policies are made, or changed. Ironically, one might say that not even the current policy has consensus; proposed as new policy, it would most probably end up being rejected.

But in the end, this proposal may suffer from a kind of chicken-and-egg problem: By the very analysis, and since it would constitute a major change, it would never have a chance to get consensus. Maybe it would have to be imposed by the foundation, or similar, to become effective.

Actually, has even the ArbCom system once been set up in consensus? --B. Wolterding (talk) 20:08, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

You mean an explicit expression of consensus? The closest thing would be the ratification vote from 2004; but that's not really applicable to the present environment of the project. Kirill 05:44, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with both the analysis and the proposed solution. (But note that any form of voting will have to seriously deal with issues of sockpuppets, more than we have up till now.) However, as Wolterding says, the chances of the community reaching consensus on such a far-reaching reform are slim. --Zvika (talk) 11:00, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not as pessimistic, I think many people are frustrated with the current state of decision making, and may support something like this, knowing that their views will still be represented. I could be wrong of course. :) - cohesion 15:12, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Correct, the Arbitrary Committee is not a legitimate authority. We are under no legitimate obligation to obey its dictates or "resolutions". Kurt Weber (Go Colts!) 15:47, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I think you'll find little traction for that argument. You're right that nobody is obligated to obey arbcom's dictates, but nobody is obligated to participate in Misplaced Pages either. If someone is sanctioned by arbcom and doesn't like it, they are free to leave, or stay and try to reverse the sanction, or stay and live with the sanction. But the argument that the sanction doesn't apply at all isn't likely to go far. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:57, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

policy consolidation

It seems to me that the most valuable thing that such a body could do is consolidate, not create, policy. Kill pages that are basically rewording of pre-existing policy, move single-author ranting to userspace, merge related policy clarifications, etc. I'm amazed that any new users can make heads or tails of our policy structure, 'cause I sure can't. - BanyanTree 10:59, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Strongly agree, simplifying and clarifying policy I think would be the best thing this group could do. There is a lot of cruft in our policies now that doesn't serve that much actual purpose, and is very confusing for new users. - cohesion 15:17, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Committee members

I propose that they be elected by the community and serve six-month terms (they are allowed to run for re-election twice). Good idea? STORMTRACKER 94 12:40, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Six month terms sounds good. I personally wouldn't necessarily want to place term limitations though. We might have a few very respected individuals who we might want to keep in office indefinitely, the "elder statemen", as it were. I hope not too many of them, but I don't think that'll be a problem. I imagine this type of post will have major burnout issues anyway, limiting the number who would even want to stay in office for very long. I really think we'd have more difficulties getting people to take on the post than possible problems of people not wanting to leave it. John Carter (talk) 14:16, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Agree, as long as there is good transparency (which I think should be an obvious goal and requirement of this plan) I think the Misplaced Pages community is well-informed enough to not require term limitations. If someone is doing something bad, I think the community will know. This is a good idea by the way. :) I like the idea of guidelines by the community, and policy by this group. - cohesion 15:04, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with 6 months (or maybe 18 months and 3 tranches, so 1/3 are elected every 6 months). Much shorter, and we waste time with constant elections, much longer and the body isn't really accountable to the community. I also see no need for term limits - if the community don't want someone to continue serving, they can just not vote for them. --Tango (talk) 15:46, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I'd actually prefer yearly terms (tranches, etc are fine by me), based on the same reasoning of tango above: "Much shorter, and we waste time with constant elections, much longer and the body isn't really accountable to the community."

Every six months is just too short a time for this. (And a yearly term has several precedents at Misplaced Pages, and Wikimedia.) - jc37 17:04, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

But so much can happen in a year, and the assembly could easily no longer represent community views by the end of the term. --Tango (talk) 17:59, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Which makes it a perfect time for an election : ) - jc37 18:31, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

No, it makes it too late for an election. The elections should be frequent enough that the assembly is always pretty close to representing the community. --Tango (talk) 18:45, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, I was actually disagreeing with the notion that at the end of a year they would be "out of touch", but was allowing that after that they potentially "could" be.

But seriously, just because you're a part of a committee, you lose touch with reading/experiencing policy? I highly doubt it. - jc37 18:59, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I didn't say they would be out of touch, I said they may no longer be representative of the community. People on the assembly are likely to be people with strong opinions that aren't likely to change as fast as the general community. They may well know what the community wants, but that doesn't mean they'll vote that way (generally, politicians vote according to their own opinions , not according to the views of their constituents). --Tango (talk) 19:47, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Let's compromise: 2 year terms, and a 2-tranche system, with elections yearly. Better? - jc37 19:28, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

How is that a compromise? It's more extreme than your last suggestion... I think 18 months terms in 3 tranches (so 6 monthly elections) is best. If you want a compromise, how about 18 month terms in 2 tranches, with 9 monthly elections? --Tango (talk) 19:49, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, actually we were (I thought) talking about two different things... Frequency of election, and length of terms. Yearly elections with 3 tranches = 3 years. Hence the "compromise". (And honestly, I do think 3 years is way too long.)

Here's the pron;em, as I see it. I would support year long terms. But I would want membership terms overlap. And that measn elections more often than a year, which I would oppose. (I think yearly elections is often enough.) So how would that be resolved? Well, a 2-year term, with 2 tranches, and yearly elections is one way. A 2 year term, with 4-tranches, and elections every 6 months is another.

I used 2-year terms because it's more easily scalable. Consider the above with single year terms: 2-tranche with elections every 6 months; 3-tranche, with elections every 4 months; 4 tranche, with elections every 3 months. Elections simply would happen way too often.

I don't like 18 month terms, sinply because it's confusing. Let's stick with terms with length in years.

So I think I'm the most strongly leaning towards 2 year terms. - jc37 21:55, 24 April 2008 (UTC).

I don't think 18 month terms is confusing. 18 monthly elections would be, but no-one is suggesting that. I wouldn't object too strongly to 2 year terms in 4 tranches, though, if people really want an integer number of years. --Tango (talk) 21:59, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Term limits

Even if very liberal in usage would be essential. Say, 3 on, 2 off, 3 on, 2 off; or 3 on, 1 off cycles. The last thing we need is a stagnant pool of delegates, when we're trying to fix stagnant policy change now. No one "needs to" or should be on something like this or the AC forever or constantly. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 13:09, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

But such term limits aren't a restriction on delegates, they're a restriction on the voting community - why shouldn't the community be able to vote for whoever they want? --Tango (talk) 15:16, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

They can. My thinking is that if Tango serves in 2009 and 2010, he takes off 2011 to let a fresh set of eyes in, but can run again in 2012 and 2013, but has to sit out 2014. The idea being so that there is deliberate shift to some degree, so that we don't end up with 80% or something of the Delegates in there for 6+ years. But if there is no support for that notion of mine, it is what it is. I'd want the same sort of thing for Arbcom, as well. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 15:32, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

A complete reversal of the nature of "policy"

We don't need a body to write "policy", because properly understood, "policy" on Misplaced Pages merely describes what is already happening, and are most emphatically not binding rules. Actions do not follow "policy"; rather, "policy" follows actions. A failure to understand this simple concept is what's truly at the root of what's wrong with Misplaced Pages. Kurt Weber (Go Colts!) 15:45, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

That's how it was meant to be, yes, but it doesn't really work like that any more because there are too many people involved. Policy being descriptive only works if we can actually establish a true consensus, and that's rarely the case any more. --Tango (talk) 15:48, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Not at all. That's the point--people go ahead and do what's best in a given specific situation. Later on, someone comes along and describes what typically happens in certain situations and writes that up as a guide so people know what to probably expect, with the understanding that there's no guarantee because there are no obligations to obey it. You don't need a "consensus" to do that; you just need to pay attention to what's going on around you. What is being proposed here is a complete repudiation of the concept of a wiki, and I will not stand for this institutionalized hypocrisy. There's enough of it already as it is. Kurt Weber (Go Colts!) 15:50, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

We already have several policies that are often considered "normative"; the main objection I have to this is that the policies were not written with that intent. If there were a body that was charged with writing reasonable, normative policies, but all people were still free to edit individual pages subject to these, that would not "repudiate" the concept of a wiki. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:00, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

You do need a consensus, otherwise you have people doing different things, so what do you write up? You can only have a descriptive policy if everyone does things the same way - ie. you have a consensus. --Tango (talk) 16:06, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Please Draft as a viable guideline

There is no way that a proposal, nay mind a guideline could be without links to WP. Even the folks at the Boston Tea Party ditched clothing and created a new constitution. What you have is the most ill thought out proposal I have ever seen. I'll work with you but - you editors refine and condense before you invite other editors to the brigade. - BpEps - t@lk 15:49, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

It's always good to have some discussion before worrying about the details of the proposal. --Tango (talk) 16:07, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Come on, the proposal is drafted as some kind of Misplaced Pages declaration of Independence. You point out nothing specific in your reform, just a lot of words which would confuse. Drop it and let editor mark it for deletion if you will not re-write it for universal understandable English. BpEps - t@lk 16:23, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

There seems to be some confusion here... it's not my proposal... --Tango (talk) 16:37, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Before it can be drafted as a viable guideline, we would have to know what the guideline would actually say, wouldn't we? That is what the discussion which has taken place to date has tried to determine. It is a comparatively newly stated, if not entirely new, idea, and as such the specific phrasing which you seem to be requesting cannot be clearly and definitively made. After there has been discussion as to what is to be included in the policy or guideline to the extent that there is agreement, if such arises, then I have no doubt that there will be the specific phrasing you're requesting. It took three weeks between when the United States Declaration of Independence was proposed and the time it was finally presented as a draft, and the people working on it were able to work on it for a concerted period of time. I would expect it to take at least that long before this proposal gets to the finished state you are requesting. John Carter (talk) 16:47, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I've written a form in a common English while still holding your principles, I think it reads better for non native English speakers/Lawyers - User:Bpeps/Governace - Really It does have your principles at heart. -- BpEps - t@lk 17:30, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Support as a legislative body

I like the comparison that someone made above to the three branches of government. We already have a judicial branch in the ArbCom, and an executive branch in Jimbo and others. What we need now is a policy making branch. I disagree with some above who have said that this new body should have the function of interpreting policies. That is already ArbCom's job and should stay that way. This body should make policy, while listening to the opinions of the community, just as a real legislature does. I think that a body of 50, with elections every six months and no term limits, sounds great, for reasons already enumerated by others above. Finally, as an aside, being interested in China as I am, I strongly support calling this new body the Legislative Yuan. (That was only partially a joke)--Danaman5 (talk) 16:36, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Since you're comparing this (I presume) to the American governmental system, Here's the difference: The application of the interpretation.

In an arbcomm case, there are several sections, including "finding of fact". Anyone can edit and propose those. In other words, anyone can be a Misplaced Pages version of a "constitutional scholar".

It's not up to Arbcomm to interpret policy (though there have been a few direct specific exceptions to this recently), it's up to Arbcomm to determine if the findings of fact apply to the case at hand, and (being pro-active, and future minded) other potential similar cases in the future.

Or to simplify (as I mentioned above) PRV would interpret policy, Arbcomm would interpret actions of an editor, and apply the policy to those actions.

• PRV is about determining policy within the framework of Misplaced Pages's mission
• Arcomm is about determining an editor's actions within the framework of Misplaced Pages policy.

And they have said repeatedly that they don't make policy. (Though, as I mentioned, there have been a few exceptions recently. All of which would likely have been handled by the PRV if it had existed then.)

I don't to get too bogged down on this, as it's something minor, and would likely come out de-facto, eventually, anyway.

Anyway, I hope that clarifies. - jc37 17:37, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

ArbCom do interpret policy - that's what the "Principles" section is for. --Tango (talk) 19:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Which are listed by anyone, and discussable by anyone. (And noting that, atm, the PRV committee doesn't exist, so someone has to, in the meantime : ) - jc37 19:43, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Proposed principles are listed and discussed by anyone. The principles that appear in the final decision are decided entirely by ArbCom. --Tango (talk) 19:44, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Idea

Add ideas if you want here to here.

- a lost of areas that would be represented.

This would act as a legislative branch in a new form of government, functions somewhat like the U.S. government:

Executive branch:

• Jimbo Wales (compare to president)
• Angela (compare to vice president)
• Board of Trustees (compare to cabinet)

Legislative branch:

• Legislative body 1 (compare to U.S. Senate, approx. 50 members)
• Legislative body 2 (compare to U.S. House, approx. 200 members)

Judicial branch:

• ArbCom (compare to Supreme Court)
• ANI (compare to lower courts)

The legislative branches would act like the U.S. legislative system, a policy must be passed my a ⅔ majority on both sides and approved by the president (Jimbo) to be passed. The first branch would be elected members of the community that apply, and would serve terms for six months. The second one would be users chosen to represent specific areas of the project, so opinions would be balanced (e.g., representative from WP:MILHIST, one from WP:KIND, one from WP:BASEBALL, etc.) STORMTRACKER 94 17:27, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

The link to the page doesn't seem to work. Also, while I don't dispute the idea that there should be representative voices from all across wikipedia, I would very much hesitate to proscribe any specific criteria (like being a member of a given WikiProject, for example.) My guess is that members of that project would support their fellow members in any event. But it clearly would help if the various nominees had all demonstrated some competence relevant to the post. John Carter (talk) 17:37, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I think that there should be one member from each major project or area represented. This would erase any possibility of biased voting, etc. STORMTRACKER 94 17:45, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I think a bicameral legislature would be a bit more than necessary at this point. Two hundred fifty legislative positions on the site would be a bit unwieldy, particularly when it comes to elections. Sχeptomaniac 17:41, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I think around a dozen, more or less, would be optimal. (Arbcomm is 15, I think). - jc37 17:53, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I think you need more than that to get decent representation - I think 50 would work well. The benefit of a small body is in discussion and drafting, but hopefully most of that will be done by the community, this body would just vote at the end. --Tango (talk) 17:58, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Why would you have Angela as VP? That seems rather random... She's a former board member, but other than that she's never held an particular power individually, and certainly doesn't now. Also, I see no need or even reason for Jimbo to have a veto on all policy decisions. He doesn't now, why would you increase his level of power? I also see no need for a bicameral system... It seems you're just trying to replicate the US system of politics as closely as possible - just because the US does it that way doesn't mean it's the best way (especially not for us, seeing as we're not even a country...)! --Tango (talk) 17:58, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I'd drop the executive branch altogether. That the Foundation's business, not ours. It could put any peron or persons in any position it would desire, at it's discretion. We'll have enough to worry about just with the other two branches, anyway. John Carter (talk) 18:04, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I'd like us to avoid comparisons to a single form of government. Misplaced Pages is not a country, and has different (though, at times similar) needs for/from governance. I really think we need to stay open-minded in this and not get bogged down by comparisons to this government or that. Yes some things may be similar or comparable, but some thing are distinctly not. - jc37 18:35, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Jc37 that comparisons to other forms of government will not really assist us in this. I think the general idea being discussed here is a very good idea but lets produce a reform that it is geared for the needs of wikipedia and keep centred on forming a policy making body and not trying to fit the different areas of wikipedia into other government structures. Davewild (talk) 18:42, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I don't think, for example, that a bicameral legislature is necessary for Misplaced Pages. The reason that such legislatures have arisen in the real world is primarily due to issues surrounding the representation of certain constituencies and disparities in wealth and stature. Since we are a group of semi-anonymous internet users, and individual members of this legislative body wouldn't be assigned to represent particular constituencies, the need for a bicameral system disappears. I was not, by the way, intending to suggest such a close alignment between Misplaced Pages and the American system, or any other system, in my comment above. I agree that any system should be geared toward the needs of Misplaced Pages.--Danaman5 (talk) 20:14, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Sounds familiar...

This reminds me somewhat of an analytical essay I wrote some time ago, User:Walton One/Constitution of Misplaced Pages. As regards the discussion above, I disagree that Jimbo and the Foundation trustees constitute the executive branch of Misplaced Pages -they're more like absentee landlords. Rather, the executive branch consists of the admins and bureaucrats. Broadly speaking, it's the community's job to make law (really a form of direct democracy except, paradoxically, without voting), the administrators' job to enforce law, and the ArbCom's job to interpret law (though they sometimes effectively make new rules, just as the US Supreme Court does from time to time).

Returning to the main topic, I do agree, though, that an elected legislature, with a fixed membership, would be a good idea for a community of this size. I disagree with Kurt Weber's remarks that policy should be merely descriptive and not prescriptive. The rule of law is inherently desirable; people should know what the rules are, what they can do and what they can't do, and should be protected from the arbitrary exercise of power. So I do support a formal "legislative" policy-making process for Misplaced Pages. Having said that, I doubt it will ever gain consensus due to the community's innate conservatism. Walton 18:22, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

That legislature should be fairly big consisting of various individuals instead of getting the same, perfect little admin group running the show. Since this probably won't happen, I'm against this idea. Monobi (talk) 20:31, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Government surely?

The United Kingdom sort of invented tiered judiciary rule and exported it after we burnt the White House down. Tiered judiciary works better because in the Uk system we have more judges and peers (Magistrates.

Appeal

• Jimbo
• Angela
• Godwin

The High Court

• Godwin (Chief Clerk)
• The Happy Arbcom Team

The Crown Court

• A Representative from Arbcom
• Misplaced Pages Bureaucrats

Magistrates

• A representative from Bureaucrats
• Two Admins picked by universal ballot/lottery

For any subject/individual/article to go up before the relevant courts (with process) it would be necessary to establish two further forces. (Leet) - 50 outstanding members of the Admin corp decided on by the ranks of the judiciary. (Police) - an admin who hasn't been reported to AN/I within the last 3 weeks. Police refer to Leet and set articles in motion. (Flagged Rollbackers do routine maintenance work and report to Admins who are not yet police. Editors just quake in fear. BpEps - t@lk 18:35, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Why is Angela appearing on all these lists? What does she have to do with anything? --Tango (talk) 18:45, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

This is true. I think Angela knows lots and lots to be co-opted onto our court of appeal while still being part of a separate organisation. The Trustees could still form part of (Privy Council/House of Lords and or European Parliament) as an further tier. BpEps - t@lk 18:56, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Rejected

Learn to use the consensus model correctly.

We've been discussing how consensus derails. This has nothing to do with how wikipedia scales, and everything to do with how people have misunderstood the consensus system in the first place.

I'll add more later, but I'm in a skype chat atm :-P

There's actually a previous similar page which was dropped Misplaced Pages:Wikirules_proposal, that was started by people who were also influentual at the time.

Finally, an attempt to remove consensus from the process probably doesn't have consensus.

--Kim Bruning (talk) 19:31, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

{ec) - I'm sorry, but I disagree. It's more acknowledging that others have "learned how to manipulate the consensus model, contrary to its intent". And by the way, if you read over consensus and consensus decision-making, you'll find that some oversight body has to make the final decision. It's the same reason some individual "someone" closes XfD discussions. So no, in my opinion, we're embracing the consensus model. - jc37 19:34, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Consensus maybe? We're using the wiki-model which roughly looks like consensus, and we're using it mostly to edit pages. For that it works. It also works well for policy, though in recent months some people have been blocking consensus inadvertently in some places. --Kim Bruning (talk) 19:52, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Which has apparently undergone quite a few changes in the past few days. That aside, Maybe, rather than talk around each other (as it seems we're doing), let's discuss consensus. I have a feeling we may agree. - jc37 20:00, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Those are mostly tidying up changes, but that's part of my point actually. ;-) This is a major policy which is not suffering any problems whatsoever with regards to maintenance. :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:15, 24 April 2008 (UTC) contrary to what is claimed here :-P ... that and we should obviously eat our own dog food

Sorry, I can't help noting this irony - somebody comes along and marks the proposal rejected (while it is still being discussed), and tells us this is the way consensus works? --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:33, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Why? We can reject bad ideas and perennial proposals that failed before? --Kim Bruning (talk) 19:46, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Who's we? The proposal is a very early stage, but several editors have expressed support on the talk page. Now a single user comes along, does not contribute to the proposal, does not engage in debate, but his very first post to the talk page is "the proposal is rejected", referring to a 3-years old discussion. And he argues with consensus. Doesn't that strike you as ironic? --B. Wolterding (talk) 08:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

You can't unilaterally reject a proposal, even if it is a perennial one. Consensus changes - read this talk page and you'll see plenty of support for the idea. I've reverting your edit. --Tango (talk) 19:37, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

It's not unilateral if the proposal is perennial. Community has spoken on this many times. Can you imagine that folks might not really ready to embrace something that states that people want to undermine the consensus model? ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 19:46, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

You're guessing what consensus is based your personal opinion, rather than actually reading this talk page. The evidence is right in front of you - read it! --Tango (talk) 19:51, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I did. I was hoping to spot something useful, but the talk page contains mostly previous perennial proposals and other failed concepts :-(. The proposers haven't helped out in documenting the current wiki-editing process, and it kind of shows. :-( --Kim Bruning (talk) 19:57, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

More extensively: The policies, guidelines, and essays till now have been descriptive of wikipedia best practices. That's why we have WP:IAR, for instance, you're allowed to do what you want, and then document what is being done. People here seem to want to institute a prescriptive system.

This is rejected by the current system for the following reasons:

• It is not actually descriptive of any particular process currently in use.
• It fails to describe any current best practice.
• It does not recognize current practice.
• It attempts to deprecate consensus.

--Kim Bruning (talk) 19:50, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Well first this is a discussion about creating a proposal, not the proposal itself.

But that aside:

• So since a process doesn't exist, a new one can't be created?
• As I've noted, this is a discussion to create the proposal, not the proposal itself.
• Consensus
• No, I disagree. It's merely dealing with some specific needs in the determination of it.

Perhaps once the proposal is in a more "finished" state, we'll agree more. (Though that might be a sign of possible "consensus"...) - jc37 19:55, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Basically I've been here before several years ago. Now, once again, people are discussing basically to abolish the consensus system. I don't think much has changed though, and I don't think that abolishing consensus is possible on a wiki. There has to be at least one person here who is willing to fight really really hard to prevent that from happening. --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:00, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

As I mention above, I'm in support of the consensus system. Maybe we're talking about similar things, or maybe different things. Let's figure that out? - jc37 20:02, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Alright, where to start? --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:11, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, we should create a page for the proposal and what it would change. STORMTRACKER 94 20:15, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

:-P And we should totally actually read other people's work on this. I've never let a committee take over policy before, and I'm not really happy to let anyone do it now either. I get the feeling that this is mostly politics. Does that make sense? --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:49, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I've been around several years as well (with varying levels of activity), and a lot has changed in that time. The main difference is that there are far more people around now - consensus decision making doesn't work with a large group. Just take a look at RfA - it is now a vote for all intents are purposes because there are too many people involved for a true consensus to ever be formed. --Tango (talk) 20:03, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually, this argument is perennial as well. It turns out that the wiki is very scalable. Only small numbers of people work on any page at any given time. --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:10, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

But we're not talking about content, we're talking about policy. Consensus works fine for the vast majority of content editing (admins can step in with protection and blocks in the few cases where it doesn't), but it doesn't work for policy making. We virtually never change policy significantly because we can never establish a consensus. I won't give examples because any particular example can be dismissed as not being broken, but do you really claim that our current policies are all near perfect? --Tango (talk) 20:15, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm, I update policy pages whenever necessary, and don't have many issues except in cases where people were blocking consensus (like in the recent NFCC situation). I gave it a BRD kick or two. How's that coming along now? People are at least talking, right? :-) --Kim Bruning (talk)

(Grin) So that's what this is. (rubs shin) - jc37 20:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about the shin! ^^;; --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:50, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Jc37: Note that the current system is consensus through wiki-editing, but this page does not at this point even remotely describe it, or link to the relevant documentation. Of course people who wrote this page are frustrated if they can't get policies together.

I understand that they would very much like to force their views on others, and are frustrated because they cannot.

I've started many policies and systems. I'm indirectly responsible for WP:5P even, and I've successfully defended the foundation issues from deprecation or deletion. I don't have a problem with the current system; Why don't people want to learn to use it?

Essentially I see this as a power-grab by the wiki-nomic contingent, and I'm not amused at all! :-P --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:08, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

How is it power grabbing by anyone? The proposal is for elections, there's no reason to believe the people proposing the change are going to win those elections. --Tango (talk) 20:17, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

If the election happens, the consensus system dies, afaict at this point in time. Perhaps people can convince me otherwise? (but it seems fairly hard, it's the proposed committee that would undermine consensus, afaict) --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:41, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

This is not about the consensus system for determining article content. Article creation by consensus is a foundation issue and nobody is proposing to change that. There is no reason to expect that policy must be formed by consensus, as well; that is not a foundation issue. At some point, as the user base gets larger, we need to accept that not everyone will be able to participate in every policy discussion. The most sensible system in that case would be the one adopted by virtually every large group of humans: to choose a smaller group to discuss and make decisions on behalf of the larger group. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:47, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the consensus system for making policy would no longer exist under this proposal, you're correct. The consensus system is already dead though - to mangle a metaphor, you're riding a dead horse. You mention you've made a few changes to policy, but how many of those were significant changes? --Tango (talk) 21:35, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

"Yes, the consensus system for making policy would no longer exist under this proposal, you're correct." - Please clarify that for me. - jc37 21:37, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

What do you want clarifying? The final decision on policy would be made by a vote of a fairly small assembly, as opposed to consensus. That's the essence of the proposal. --Tango (talk) 21:43, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Right. Do others agree with you on that? --Kim Bruning (talk) 21:53, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I do. We need a formal process of approval for new policies, which must inevitably involve a binding vote. This nebulous concept of "consensus" is fine for a small wiki, but is not sufficient for so large a community as this one. Walton 22:21, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't. At least not those words, the way I read them.

The use of the word "final" is absolutely a non-starter, for one thing.

I'm starting to wonder if I'm truly understanding the proposal. (And hoping that this proposal is still adaptable enough to still be workable from within the "wiki-way".) - jc37 22:27, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

The proposal is hard to understand, because the details haven't yet been gone into. However, I think that the essence of the proposal is, in effect, to create a body which would be able to act when the situation requires action to resolve existing problems. This is not to say that it would act in any circumstances beyond those. I don't think that anyone is envisioning a government like the US government, where various presidents enact whatever proposals they deem necessary. It is a streamlined, representative way to enable necessary actions to be made in circumstances as required. There are additional proposals as well, but those are pretty much secondary to the main proposal.

It has been said that "this is not the wiki way." Perhaps it has not been to date. But I also very seriously doubt that "the wiki way" is to have people wringing their hands about how there is no consensus to pull the fire alarm even though the building is clearly burning down. I do not doubt that any policies or guidelines enacted by this group, were it to exist, would be and should be altered. In fact, I imagine they would be changed rather frequently and substantially. However, "the wiki way", as it has evidently been to date, cannot be said to be such endless argument about whether something should be done, and then realizing that while the discussion has continued the problem has possibly gone too far to be easily countered.

I believe that this organization has come too far, due to the remarkable, valuable input of so many, for us to allow it to collapse because of the inabiility of editors to ever agree to anything. We cannot stand by and argue about whether getting water violates policy when the city we have all worked so hard to build burns down. Every voluntary organization goes through "growing pains", this one included. It seems to me that the opposition to this proposal is primarily from those who, for whatever reason, have decided to, metaphorically, reject such growth. They are as individuals free to do so. However, I do not believe that they have the power or authority to reject ideas which seem to be necessary for the continuing functioning of the project out of hand, simply because they seek to declare "consensus" problems on the second day of the idea's proposal. No one has yet gone into any details, and the details are extremely important. I think it would be best for all of us if we withheld any final judgements until such time as those proposals are concretely made. John Carter (talk) 00:03, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

So emergency de-policy or make-policy? No thanks. Policy is for general situations, not exceptional stand alone events. Exceptional stand alone events are exactly what IAR may be used for. Those times which policy doesn't cover the situation; correctly, exactly, or at all. - jc37 00:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Partially. More accurately, maybe finally getting around to creating a policy regarding an idea which has been discussed, possibly more than once, in the past, but where a formal policy was never developed because people thought "it'll never happen" or "it won't happen often enough for there to be a policy." And I can't see de-policying ever happening. Most policies have been created over time, and there is no reason to think that those policies would be made redundant. Maybe a better metaphor would be placing a ill-formed bandage over a wound to prevent further damage. It would certainly be true that the bandage would be replaced and treatment possibly change later. And I cannot imagine, as stated in the bottom section, that it would happen very often. My personal guess would be that, basically, when it becomes clear, either by statements of ArbCom, Jimbo, the legal office, or potentially other parties that guidelines or policies need to be created to prevent a problem from recurring, this group would be able to create such a basic policy. Once created, it would be subject to change, like all other policies, up to and including being marked historical if required. Maybe they'd be most similar to legislative aides, who basically write bills but don't enact or regulate them. Once it's written, and the proximate reason for its creation is at least addressed in some form, the community would be given a period of time to address any concerns they might have, probably a month or so?, and then if there is consensus a final, minimal, draft of the policy is created. John Carter (talk) 00:39, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

(de-dent) - So policy "clerks"? Sounds like a group of scriveners. "Here, we've decided that we should have a policy regarding X. Write it up for us." Would they have their own wiki for this, or could anyone join in on the fun? : )

(A bit of levity, it's been a long discussion : ) - jc37 00:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

It has been long, and God knows I haven't done anything to help that. But, yeah, basically just that, a group to write policies with community input when it becomes clear that such policies are required. I don't think there would be the need for a separate wiki, though. I don't think any of us would want anything like a presidential administration, which could change taxes or declare war, just write the minimal policy required for circumstances. Although if we ever do declare war, Citizendium had bloody well better watch out. ;) John Carter (talk) 00:55, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Then it looks like you aren't understanding the proposal either. It's starting to appear that what is being asked for is a parliament, of sorts, which will simply create policy (rather than create policy pages, as you're suggesting). That's not what I had envisioned, I must admit, when first joining in this discussion. (I'm seriously considering writing up my proposal, though. The more I think about it, the better it sounds.) - jc37 01:07, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I think part of the parliamentary appearance is due to the fact that we would want to be able to ensure that all relevant viewpoints are included in the proposal, which would logically include people from as many different, potentially relevant fields, as possible. And, for what it's worth, believe it or not, the Congress of the US was set up initially to basically act in substantially the same way, only acting when it had become necessary, and otherwise basically engaging in endless debate but never actually doing anything. The problem right now is that we've got the last part, endless debate but never actually doing anything, down to an art, but haven't gotten the need to occasional act part down very well. And I don't myself see a difference here between policy and policy pages, just like I don't see a difference between law and passed legislative bills. Any policy by definition would be in policy pages. I think we're all too used to the busy, "hands-on" nature of modern legislatures to really grasp the idea of a "caretaker" government, but I think that the latter is what is really being proposed here. The problem is the reason for the proposal is the fact that we haven't to date done a particularly good job as "caretakers" in all cases, so that it looks like we're talking about an "activist" government, when all that Kirill and others seem to have initially proposed is a "adequately activist" government, i.e., one which has done more than we have done to date in certain required areas. And I personally wouldn't mind seeing as many proposals as possible. The more the better, in fact. John Carter (talk) 01:23, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I see the confusion now. (At least one of them.) I think you'll find rather strong opposition to the idea that "policy" = "policy page". The arguement is that "policy" exists whether there is a page about it or not. That's my whole point in my proposal. The PRV committee would determine whether or not the page in question measures up to actually represent policy. That's it. It doesn't create policy, but merely be a group which would review pages, and determine if they represent policy. If you want to create a proposal to have some volunteer scriveners group set up to help write up what is already determined to be policy, that's cool too. Sounds like a WikiProject to me, though... - jc37 01:51, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

We have a fundamental disagreement there, then. As I see it, the problem we're trying to fix isn't writing policy pages, it's writing policy. If there is a consensus then writing the page is easy. It's the cases where there isn't a consensus, so there is no policy at present, that we need a group that can step in and write the policy (based on their own judgement, guided by the community). If there is a consensus then this group would just need to tick the box and that's it - the policy pages could be written by the community as they are now. --Tango (talk) 15:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, so people really would like to resurrect the proposal system that we thought was buried by now. *sigh* Back to square one, I guess. --Kim Bruning (talk) 08:06, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

In response to Jc37, I think we would have to know where this policy which isn't written down could be found if it isn't written down, and how it could be known to be policy. It seems to be declaring that there are one or more "unwritten policies" which have to be followed. Taking recourse to such unwritten policies can be problematic, because they are, almost by definition, impossible to revise, because no one is entirely sure what they are in the first place, and are certainly, at the least, among the ones which noobs would be least familiar with, having never seen them anywhere. Now, this isn't saying that each policy would necessarily be a separate page, but rather that they would all be mentioned in at least one policy page. But if there is anything which is really almost explicitly contrary to a transparent system of governance, it is taking recourse to "policies" which aren't necessarily specifically defined, aren't written down anywhere, and thus can't be revised, because their exact nature isn't clearly known. John Carter (talk) 15:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

What I'm at least suggesting

The way I was seeing this discussion heading was towards a committee which would act as a whole in the same way an admin acts in closing a DRV discussion.

I was and am opposed to the bureaucratic creation of subcommittees and the like, since we have the entire Wikipedian community to support the committee (the exact same way the community supports/aids in arbcomm discussions).

This is not the creation of a parliament or congress!

This is why I am in support of a small committee (comparable to the number of regular closers at DRV or the membership of arbcomm).

And this committee should be allowed to exercise their judgement and discernment the way arbcom does, as opposed to how bureaucrats are straight-jacketed in closing RfAs.

And since this committee would be elected by the community, and that vetting process would presumably determine that they are likely well--founded in policy and process, I was also suggesting that this committee would be useful as a knowledge-base, a source that arbcomm could draw upon in reagrds to interpretation of policy.

Now if I'm mistaken in this, and this proposal is about the creation of a parliament or congress, then I'll likely step over and join KB in soundly rejecting such a proposal as contrary to the foundation's principles.

I hope this helps clarify. - jc37 20:16, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

What I'm suggesting is probably somewhere inbetween. I think the assembly should do more than just determine consensus (you say they would be allowed to exercise their own judgement, but I'm not sure to what extent you mean - I would have them working entirely with their own judgement), but they should certainly be guided by community discussion. If you try and have it so they determine consensus but with a little leeway in how they do that you'll just end up with the same thing as happened on RfA - people complain so much whenever the exact vote count isn't followed that crats have no choice by the just count votes. --Tango (talk) 20:21, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Exactly. No abitrary straight-jackets allowed. - jc37 20:24, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Committees should not exist if the resolutions they make are binding. The same people calling the shots leads to corruption. If we are going to have a body that makes binding decisions, I'd like to see one that has different people for each "case", or whatever it maybe. Something like a Jury system, even. Monobi (talk) 20:28, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

(ec) - The resolutions may be "binding", but they also may be subject to change. Note that arbcomm is not held to precedent for these and other reasons. - jc37 20:37, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

A jury system would be good. STORMTRACKER 94 20:35, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Wondering if you'd consider arbcomm to be a "jury of our peers". - jc37 20:41, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

If decisions aren't binding (but subject to change, of course), there's not really any point making them. A jury might work, but the logistics are far more complicated than for an elected body. As long as the elections are frequent enough (I say 6 months, perhaps with 3 tranches yielding 18 month terms), we should avoid the problem Monobi points out of the ruling body becoming corrupt. --Tango (talk) 20:59, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I wasn't suggesting that we have no groups with non-binding resolution, but instead we shouldn't have committees of the same people for 3 years who call the shots. Monobi (talk) 21:04, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

WP:CCC used to be called "no binding decisions". . The discussion page there is very interesting too. :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:40, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I'll note that I was using "binding" to indicate the short term, current case focus of arbcom, not as a long-term, "permanent" remedy". (Clarifying for others, because I think KB understood already : ) - jc37 20:45, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, with your view, it might work...but you'd not have random people, or experts, but elected people, right? (random people and experts have both been known to be able to write complex things like encyclopedias. Elected people have been known to set PI=3. )

I'm also not sure that your position is actually what's intended here.

I'm actually quite happy about using consensus editing on policy. It's really good to be able to eat our own dog food to be able to update documentation about ourselves. If we can't eat our own dog food, then that's not really a show of confidence is it? :-P

I'm quite happy to teach others how to do consensus/wiki based editing, including on policy. I've written documentation on how that works out, and I even intend to do a talk about it at Misplaced Pages:Lectures. --Kim Bruning (talk) 02:28, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

(random people and experts have both been known to be able to write complex things like encyclopedias. Elected people have been known to set PI=3. )

Though it has an interesting flawed logic in how the comparison works, it's still an absolutely great comment : ) - jc37 03:09, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The italics comments are intended to be more whimsical. :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 03:29, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

And actually, I'd like to presume that we'd be "electing" Misplaced Pages policy "experts". We're just using the elective to vett them. (And yes, I realise I'm turning a blind eye to more than a few of the problems with elections : ) - jc37 03:12, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Abolish ArbCom

ArbCom needs to go. It is a source of much "wiki-corruption" and does nothing more than create extra problems. Great example is with privatemusings, and users supposedly proxy editing for him (as well as others), while he (and others) was/were banned by ArbCom. This just lead to pointless edit warring over nothing important and sometimes caused good edits to be reverted. Also, ArbCom ignores all sense of community input. They might say "email arbcom for suggestions about who should be a checkuser" or whatever, but in the end, as revealed by the Arbcom mailing list leak about Majorly, they just do what they personally want. Finally, ArbCom is illegitimate. It wasn't created by the community, it was created by a person with no particular authority. If there is ONE thing that comes out of this, I'd like to see ArbCom removed. MedCom on the other hand, can stay, because it isn't binding nor forced. Monobi (talk) 20:23, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually, Arbcom was ratified by the community in 2004. The checkuser thing is a red herring - checkusers have never been appointed by community discussion, and unless a consensus develops to do so, the arbitrators are acting properly in appointing checkusers using their own discretion. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:32, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

It was not created by what the community wanted, but by what was dictated. Also, just because checkusers might not of previously been elected by the community doesn't mean we can't start now. The current system is failing. Monobi (talk) 20:47, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Nevertheless, it was approved by the community. If they didn't agree with it, nobody was forcing them to vote in favor of it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:53, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

30 votes supporting over 4 years ago is hardly what I call a community. Monobi (talk) 20:55, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

You're free to try to find consensus to reverse the ratification, but the approval appears to be in order. Simply because Arbcom was approved before some editors began editing doesn't mean it is illegitimate. But my suspicion is that if there was a vote today Arbcom would again be approved. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:10, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually, 4 years ago, 30 votes was a pretty decent turnout. --Tango (talk) 21:15, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

What would you replace ArbCom with? We need some way of dealing with behavioural issues when we can't establish a community consensus. --Tango (talk) 20:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Replace them with a system that has minimal interference with normal wiki activity (specific behavioral problems with specific users, not general behavior) and that system should be wanted by the community, with the community able to remove it at anytime. Monobi (talk) 20:47, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

You've just described ArbCom... --Tango (talk) 21:00, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

There's some proposed systems out there that might be more scalable. --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:42, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it works ok, for the most part. Though I have to agree, 3 years is a long time to stand a post here, especially from a single election.

(This parenthetical suggestion is merely a suggestion for arbcomm: 2 year terms might be a move in the right direction.) - jc37 20:52, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, 3 years is a long time - what percentage of Arbitrators have completed their elected terms? Not many, I think... --Tango (talk) 21:01, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I think 8-month terms would be plenty long. Shorter terms are better for accountability as well as being important to get busy but wise people to commit. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:10, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

To answer my own question - it looks like 2 people have completed a 3 year elected term and at least 6 have resigned early (could be more - it's difficult to tell from the timeline who was elected to a 3 year term in the first place). So we're talking about at least an 78% drop out rate! --Tango (talk) 21:10, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

ArbCom needs fixed. It's broken. Changing the length of terms won't fix this entirely, although it is certainly a start. Monobi (talk) 22:09, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Can you provide more detail? --Kim Bruning (talk) 02:29, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

(e/c)If we shorten the term length, we also have to make the election process less horrible (though we should do that even if we don't change anything else). Mr.Z-man 02:32, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, at some point I said some choice words about the arbcom election procedure, and never ran again. ^^;; --Kim Bruning (talk) 02:39, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Eww, why would you want to run in the first place :P Mr.Z-man 02:40, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

It wasn't too bad at one point ... --Kim Bruning (talk) 02:52, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Size of the community

I was curious a few days ago just how many active users there are. I used the recent changes logging information for a one-month period to generate a table showing how many logged-in users edited the site. (Note: because I was lazy, all IP editors are counted as a single userid in the table.)

The impression I take is that there are far more than the fabled "500 editors" active here. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:04, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

<grin> ... Now... try a histogram of number of editors per page. O:-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 21:07, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

You've made that point before - we're not talking about content, we're talking about policy. It doesn't matter if only 2 people ever edit Pokemon (number and article chosen at random), lots of people are interested in each major policy. --Tango (talk) 21:12, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Your wish, granted. The drop off is not as fast as might be expected. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:21, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

That is pretty steep - the drop off from 1 to 5 is 95%! It's not too step from then on, but it doesn't need to be. 95% of pages edited in that month were edited by only one person, that's a lot! Kim is completely right about the statistics, they just aren't relevant to this discussion. --Tango (talk) 21:31, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, a lot of people can be right about statistics simultaneously. Yes, many pages were edited by only one person. On the other hand, 55k were edited by 5 people and 14k by 10 people. I'm not worried much about the pages only edited by one person, since any system works fine when you're alone. It's the pages that have multiple editors that interest me. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

You're right, but it's still not relevant to this discussion. --Tango (talk) 21:45, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I think we're in complete agreement here, if you're saying that those 33k users who each made 10 article edits all are affected by policy even if they edit different articles. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:51, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Almost - it's not "affected by" that's important but rather "interested in being involved in". In the same way that the number of readers of an article doesn't affect how easy it is to establish a consensus of those editing it, the number of people affected by a policy doesn't affect how easy it is to establish a consensus of those writing the policy. --Tango (talk) 21:55, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

The number of people affected by any change to a policy page is 0. The number of people interested in updating a policy page at any moment in time (not counting spurious meatball:ExpandScope escapades :-P) is actually quite low, from what I've observed myself by eyeball. --Kim Bruning (talk) 23:04, 24 April 2008 (UTC) (what do your own statistics show, CBM?).

Hang on! Who made 5000 edits to the WP and WT namespaces in one month? Whoever it is needs professional help!! --Tango (talk) 21:14, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Er, sorry about that. I didn't remove userid 0, which is shared by all IP editors, from the table. So if you really want to limit it to just logged-in users you have to subtract 1 from each cell. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:26, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

So based on dunbar, we hypothesized that if there were only <150 people per page, we didn't need (additional) governance at the time. We presented that at Wikimania Boston. That was several years ago. Apparently, that still holds. :-) Misplaced Pages still operates the same way it did several years ago. --Kim Bruning (talk) 22:01, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

You're not listening, are you? We're not talking about content, we're talking about policy. Content can and will still be determined by consensus. --Tango (talk) 22:04, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I was going to ask the same question - how does the number of editors per article relate to the process by which we create policy? — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:06, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

That's not my problem actually. You argued that wikipedia was becoming too large and that we needed to change the way we governed it. Now you've done the numbers, and based on what we know about communities, it seems that the wiki can practically run itself. (I sometimes have the idea that it continues to run despite the community these days ;-) )

I didn't make the initial claim, I just showed that your claim was demonstrably incorrect. :-) The wikipedia dynamics are still the same as ever.

Pushing my point further: nothing has changed. People claim that something must have changed every year, but every year, no change. :-P

Pushing yet further: Why do you want to change the way wikipedia functions in such a fundamental way, when there is absolutely no grounds to do so, and where it has been demonstrated by many years of success that the model actually works better than anything that has ever come before?

Well alright, if you came up with some radically new proposal we've never heard of before, and that looked scalable and promising, well I'd certainly give it the time of day. I love that kind of thing! :-) But that's not what you're doing here.

--Kim Bruning (talk) 22:14, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm having trouble following. Nobody is claiming that it's hard to work on an article with 2 other editors, or proposing to change the model for article writing. The claim is that the policy-creation process is broken. The numbers I ran above don't seem (to me) to reflect on the policy-creation process at all. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:20, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Is this the policy creation process where you try to tell other people what they're supposed to do? ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 22:30, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Not I; I have been arguing for a long time that policies are descriptive, and not binding, and that in any case we don't even have to read them. However, I find it harder and harder to make that argument with a straight face, since it has become a minority viewpoint. Many editors already feel that our policies are normative documents, and opinion is shifting even further in that direction. As I am somewhat resigned to that mentality taking over, I would like to see a system that can handle normative policies in a sensible, reasonable, responsible way. (By the way, as a personal favor, could you use fewer smilies in responses to me?) — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:38, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

We just killed the previous normative policy crap 6-12 months ago. Then we finally manged to get rid of the non-negotiable clause recently (people were using it to non-negotiate their way out of NPOV :-P ) ... normative policies totally suck. Why would we ever want to adopt a known broken system when we have a clueful system in place? --Kim Bruning (talk) 22:59, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Don't ask me. I'm saying I think the change of viewpoint is already underway; ask the people who support it why they do. My view is that if I am going to be stuck under these normative policies I would rather see them developed in a reasonable way. Note that I didn't propose this change, I just support it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:24, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Eh? I don't want to be stuck under normative policies. You don't want to be stuck under normative policies. I think the logical conclusion is that both of us should be acting to stop normative policies. --Kim Bruning (talk) 02:16, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The idea that policy is descriptive of what people actually do is great - as long as everyone does the same thing, ie. as long as we have a consensus. The site is now too large for that to generally be the case (we'd have no need for ArbCom if everyone agreed on policy, would we?), so normative policies are the only option. --Tango (talk) 15:33, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I'll give an example to help you. Take a look at Misplaced Pages:Attribution/Poll - we had nearly 1000 people take part in that attempt to make policy. 1000 is bigger than 150... --Tango (talk) 22:08, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Let's all stay friendly here. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:12, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

<Slow... evil... grin...> I totally opposed that poll, you can look through the page histories and see me doing it. My argument there (IIRC) was that making a poll there would end up as no consensus and would kill the whole thing. The reason that would happen is because making a large poll pulls in more than 150 people, making it impossible to discuss anything anymore.

Sound familiar? I then proposed we try use the wiki-editing method instead, and take things slow and one step at a time. Sound familiar some more? ;-)

Some of the people there were too think-headed to listen, and thus they blithely went ahead and killed their own proposal.

So now you'd like to use that *against* my position? :-D --Kim Bruning (talk) 22:22, 24 April 2008 (UTC) , some comments why the poll won't provide useful information., I'm sure I made comments earlier too, but there's a lot of ATT archives I shan't go through now.

My viewpoint is that polls like that will become more and more inevitable as more and more people take an interest in policies. But I agree with you that the polls never accomplish anything. That's why I would like to see a system that does accomplish something. I'm not sure how you would manage to replace any established policy with another (regardless of merit) by just editing the policy page; there would always be a group of editors who would oppose the change. Indeed, this is now the S.O.P. on many policy pages I see. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:42, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Those polls are far far from inevitable. The community dynamics have not changed. Your own numbers show they have not changed. Why do you argue like they have changed? --Kim Bruning (talk) 22:59, 24 April 2008 (UTC) if the SOP on some particular page has become to block consensus. Try WP:BRD first, or better yet, remove those folks from wikipedia entirely. They're not here to help with the wiki, after all. If bullies prevent you from forming consensus, why would you want to choose the side of the bullies?

Nicely constructed, but still fallacious : ) - jc37 23:12, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Where did I put the fallacy? Let me correct it. --Kim Bruning (talk) 02:16, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The last sentence did you in. Presumptive, prescriptive, and all that. - jc37 03:05, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Urk. <ponder> --Kim Bruning (talk) 03:15, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

My understanding was that, prior to the poll of doom, WP:ATT was built and instituted based on the consensus of the editors present at the time. The problem was that more than 1000 editors became interested in the policy and therefore most of them felt left out of the discussion. The accusations flying about of trying to "sneak in" a new policy are exactly why trying to craft major new policies by consensus flat out don't work; WP:ATT had already lost any chance at wiki-wide consensus before the poll even began. Nifboy (talk) 06:05, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Such worries are easily soothed. You are just polite to everyone that comes along and cheerfully point out that consensus can change, and please pull up a chair and join the fun! People can try really hard, but they can't feel left out for long like that. :-)

In the case of ATT, a couple of people who had worked on the policy actually decided they wanted that poll. Oops.;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 07:52, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The problem with ATT is that Jimbo decided to kill it. I never figured out why, but that was that; it was never going to be possible to recover once he yanked it for "discussion". — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:17, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Organizational behavior 101: People are more likely to accept a decision if they've had a hand in the process. Because discussion can only involve so many people, only so many people can readily accept something like ATT, which was in the works for, what, four months? Nifboy (talk) 14:43, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

So what happens 3-5 five years from now when we may add a 0 to the end of the number of editors? Sorry, Kim--we agree often, but discussion for the sake of discussion is a waste of time. Discussion as a means to an end is meritous. Deciding things by voting/polling is not a bad thing. We voted to ratify Arbcom (probably should be re-ratified every x years, to be frank), we voted on WP:3RR, we voted on the main page, we vote for Arbcom (it's a vote--Jimmy's authority is because we let him have it only, now that he has no ownership legal authority in Misplaced Pages and he would be bounced if he screwed the community and ignored our votes), we vote for admins, we vote for beurocrats, we vote for stewards, and we certainly vote for the WMF board in a pure election. I looked at that ATT poll; the problem there was every busybody apparently just had to have their say in the structure of the vote. The "Delegate Panel", my vote for the name of this proposed body, could also be used to build these major votes fairly. What works today is certainly not going to work tomorrow. Let's be forward-looking. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 14:00, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Same old same old? Yes. And for a reason.

I apologize for the length of this, but ... unfortunately, I don't have time to cut it down.

A few months back, WP:PRX was proposed as an experiment, to set up a system whereby a user could name a proxy by creating a proxy file in their own user space; a proxy table could then be created by transcluding the proxy files. The proposal actually did not set up any specific applications, but the full name of it was Misplaced Pages:Delegable proxy. The idea, basically, is that if some users name a proxy, and those proxies name proxies, etc., that one can estimate how many users a particular proxy represents, ultimately, by following the proxy table recursively. "Represents" is very rough, no proposal was made (nor did I support) any idea that the proxies were formal representatives; rather, they were simply users trusted by other users to be likely to make a decent decision when the user does not personally participate, and then that information can be used in various ways.

However, this method has, outside, been proposed by some for governmental applications. An interesting and very old proposal was made by Lewis Carroll in the 1880s, what is now called Asset Voting, which would see its best application for proportional representation, Dodgson (Carroll) was proposing it for that. If a candidate is not elected (i.e., does not get a defined quota of votes), the candidate may, by negotiation or otherwise, recast the votes; also a candidate who is holding more votes than necessary for a seat may recast any excess votes. What has been noticed is that the initial "candidates" become public electors, who deliberatively form an assembly. The process has no losers, per se, votes aren't wasted (except for the "dregs," which could be very small, and even with those there is a way to make the assembly *totally* democratic, i.e., fully representative.)

Anyway, WP:PRX was immediately tagged Rejected, apparently based on a false idea that it was (1) about voting, and (2) that it would create a bureaucracy, like AMA and Esperanze. Both of these were false. PRX was just a proposal that we experiment with what happens if editors name proxies, function to be determined *later*. That is, we can suggest functions, some are pretty obvious, but ....

PRX could create an assembly representing all those who decided to participate. The problem of scale is well-known in democracy, Misplaced Pages is not the first organization to face it! What has often been missed, however, is that the *essential* problem of scale is one of noise; try to find consensus in large groups, and the number of people participating either grows to the point where there is too much noise, or the number of people participating does *not* grow and a small group runs the organization. Which sometimes works. The problem is that sometimes it doesn't work, and, indeed, there can come to be a conflict of interest between the individuals who come to be in positions of influence and power and the general "membership." It is very natural, and it is not due to greed or power hunger. But it also creates a gap, with the general membership feeling more and more like "they" -- the in-group -- run the show....

So, classically, large organizations that started as peer democracies (Misplaced Pages was *roughly* that -- democracy does not mean "voting"), devolve into oligarchies or what can amount to a kind of oligarchy, a "representative democracy." But representative democracies, if they are organized through fixed elections for terms, can themselves develop quite a gap between the "people" and the "government." There is a way around this: the problem with direct democracy wasn't voting, per se, but deliberation. If too many people try to deliberate, the noise becomes too much. Voting, likewise, places too much of a burden on those whose interest and available time is insufficient to be informed on the issues. I wish I had a nickle for every AfD vote I've seen that was apparently based on a 30-second review of the nomination. If that. And most people just stay away.... With delegable proxy, anyone might still be able to participate, but "votes" can be weighted according to some kind of trust level expressed through the proxy system. And that does not mean that decisions would be made by "voting," decisions could be made just as they are now, by trusted individuals based on the advice that the community provides and their own investigation.

What do we have here, with this page? Just proposed, two days ago, and lots of opinions being expressed. Already an attempt to place a Rejected tag. How long does it take to actually consider a proposal? I can say this: if the number of participants is unlimited, it can take forever. It doesn't take forever, to be sure, to "Reject" a proposal, all it takes is enough people willing to make a snap judgment and vocally express it. WP:PRX wasn't just "Rejected," a group of editors tried to eradicate it, thoroughly. The person who proposed it -- a bit impulsive, to be sure -- was blocked, and, underneath all the immediate causes was a sense that he wanted to change things. Disruptive, that intention is. So ... I suggest that if we want to form an Assembly, we can. There is nothing stopping us. But if we try to do it on-wiki, we will see a repeat of the contention and endless and tendentious debate that has happened again and again. Delegable proxy can form an assembly, ad-hoc, without elections. The assembly can function in different sizes as needed; it's a characteristic of delegable proxy that a small group can represent a large one, and "small" can be very small, if needed, and "large" can grow without limit, at least the present human population isn't too large. TANSTAAFL: make the assembly too small, it becomes less representative because relatively more compromise must be made, make it too large, it becomes cumbersome.

However, basic rule: assemblies make their own rules. The U.S. Constitution, for example, does not specify the rules for the House of Representatives for the Senate; those bodies make their own rules. If we simply start naming proxies, and start a mechanism for those who wish to participate -- i.e., *work on it, not merely oppose it* -- we can create an assembly, in short order, that would represent the participants, empowered as much as they care to empower it. None of this takes anything away from those who don't participate. This Assembly, initially, would merely advise. Whom would it advise? Whoever wants to listen! It would advise its own participants with regard to cooperation in connection with the project, and it would advise others who might be interested in what a broad (or even narrow) peer organization of editors concluded. As consensus.

Such an assembly, at least initially, would have no power to bind anyone, it would not, if it follows my advice, make decisions except trivially about its own process. Rather, it would report consensus, after deliberation, and it could deliberate in small groups.

Is Misplaced Pages ready for this? Definitely not several months ago, and I'd be surprised to find that it is now. But I'd love to be wrong! In any case, interested? Email me off-wiki. The fact is that two people communicating and cooperating, seeking consensus, can do more than one, and three more than two. --Abd (talk) 23:27, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

be aware, this user is trying to form a circle of meatpuppets to force in his proxy editing (or the "sockmasters charter") - someone he contacted off wiki confirmed this to me. --87.115.8.27 (talk) 14:00, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

oh and he has an active meatpuppet in Sarsaparilla (blocked but still editing under various accounts) - the general pattern is that one of the two proposes some policy change and the other turns up to support it - be watchful for new accounts turning up here to !vote and support this. --87.115.8.27 (talk) 14:08, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Proposed additions

I believe something along the lines of the following could be reasonably added.

"Misplaced Pages has always been an encyclopedia which anyone can edit. The freedom to edit expressed in that statement will remain a cornerstone of wikipedia. 'That government is best which governs least' is a position which will be taken if reform would take place. There would be no intention to create any more policies or guidelines than are absolutely required by circumstances. However, there are now, and have been in the past, situations when policies or guidelines needed to be enacted, and with some speed. It is for these instances, and these instances alone, which the policy making body is being considered for creation. Other events, recently and in the more distant past, have also indicated that it would be useful for other, more formal procedures and practices to be established in some instances, to prevent the possibility of abuse of the system. The fundamental goals and ideals of wikipedia would remain the same should this proposal be enacted. However, it is clear that some changes are clearly needed, and it is only to address those required changes that this proposal is being made."

OK, I know I repeat myself more than a little, and that I tend to use too many words as often as not, but I hope at least the idea is clear enough. John Carter (talk) 23:46, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Um, more formal procedures and practices typically allow easier abuse of a system. This seems to be counter-intuitive to some people, but that doesn't make it less true ^^;; --Kim Bruning (talk) 02:31, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

more formal procedures and practices typically allow easier abuse of a system - I disagree. In the real world, the rule of law is prized for a reason; having formal rules, which must be obeyed by everyone (even those in power), ensures that those in power are held to account and cannot act arbitrarily. If punishment is handed out without reference to the rules, then people cannot reasonably conform their conduct to the rules and thereby escape sanction. (See the work of Joseph Raz for more on this topic.)

In the specific context of Misplaced Pages, it is a lot easier for a new user if they can just look at a page of rules and find out how things work. If the rules are unwritten, or made up by the admins as they go along, then new users can find themselves blocked without realising that they did anything wrong. (This actually happened to me on Wiktionary, where I created an account some time ago as wikt:User:Eric the Gnome in order to see how newbies were treated. But that's another story for another time.) Policies and guidelines are therefore inherently a good thing, though they should also be kept in check. Walton 08:22, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Documentation of best practices is always a good thing. I agree so far. The part I disagree with is that having strict, prescriptive policies is a good thing. A good example is declaring things "non-negotiable". While several policies were marked "non-negotiable", people started "non-negotiating" their way out of following NPOV, for instance. Oops ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 08:25, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't know quite what you mean there; NPOV is indeed a non-negotiable policy (and rightly so, since it defines the character of the encyclopedia). Obviously, in practice, the way NPOV should be applied to some contentious topics is debatable and negotiable (the evolution-creation controversy, for instance), but this doesn't mean people are rejecting the policy. I've never, so far, seen anyone justify their changes to an article by asserting that we don't need to follow NPOV (rather, they tend to assert that their opponent is not following NPOV).

The point of having strict, prescriptive policies is that everyone is bound by them, from the most experienced admin to the newest editor; and if an admin violates policy, they can be held to account. It's exactly the same principle as having strict, prescriptive laws in real life. Do you think the United States Constitution should be downgraded to a "documentation of best practice"? Power, wherever it is found, has to be held in check. Walton 11:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Kim seems to be me to be maybe arguing a case which no one else is arguing against. There is no intention that I know of for this to become a bureaucracy. However, that is not the same as saying that there is not a need for more policies than we currently have. One of the current, unfortunate, cases before ArbCom is about a case where an admin, probably with no intended unacceptable motives, acted in a way which just about everybody else agrees was not in the best interests of wikipedia. In such a case, a policy or guideline (I personally question how much functional difference there is) relevant to an admin acting in a situation where he could be perceived as having a COI would be one that just about everyone could agree with. A few policies/guidelines have been suggested to deal with such situations, because there is no reason to think they would not recur if such policies/guidelines do not exist to mitigate them.

If ArbCom, Jimbo, or, potentially, a clear consensus on one or more of the Admin noticeboards indicate that there is just cause for a policy/guideline to be created, then I can't see any reason why one cannot be proposed. If through examination that policy or guideline should be found to be either inherently unenforcable or otherwise problematic, then clearly that policy or guideline will be rejected. Also, if someone were to violate one of these polices or guidelines, with extant mitigating circumstances, there wouldn't necessarily be serious consequences, although that possibility would clearly exist.

And I don't know of anyone suggesting that anything but the most core policies are necessarily "non-negotiable", because any policy can be and generally is changed. In fact, creation of such a policy board would probably help ensure that the extant policies and guidelines are more likely to be kept "up to date". With a sufficiently broad base, it could also help ensure that these new policies/guidelines don't create more harm in some area than good in general.

I don't imagine anyone is thinking of this as being a major editorial responsibility, to the degree that being a member of ArbCom is. With sufficient members to divide the responsibilities, it would leave most free to do other activities most of the time. But it would also permit us to not have to repeatedly invoke policies or guidelines which may not clearly be appropriate in the situation, like invoking IAR in cases of "emergencies" or problematic situations which could be and are anticipated, and should be addressed, but haven't been yet because there hasn't been sufficient focused attention to the matter for a policy or guideline to become enacted. John Carter (talk) 14:12, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

"Kim seems to be me to be maybe arguing a case which no one else is arguing against.". Tango argues that we should abolish consensus. Walton argues here that we should adopt hard rules. Together, this would be the start of some of the most sweeping changes since the Nupedia project set up a wiki. (And quite frankly, it would be a reversal). --Kim Bruning (talk) 15:11, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Then your comments should probably be directed clearly toward them, rather than posted as a response in a thread which kind of indicates the exact contrary. And I would expect, in the initial stages of any discussion, there would be any number of ideas. That is to be expected, and probably even encouraged, as part of an open process. But to write a response to one proposal, which seems to be expressing concerns regarding the possible consequences of other proposals, strikes me as, well, odd. And I read WaltonOne's statement above, which dealt exclusively with NPOV, which basically already is a non-negotiable policy, although the exact phrasing of it is and always should be open to question and amended, as circumstances require. And to put together just those two ideas, out of all that have yet been proposed, and say that, on the basis of a minority of comments on a new proposal, the proposal should be rejected, is at best dubious thinking. John Carter (talk) 15:45, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Another approach

I think a key approach is missing from the page, which is the actual current consensus process. Might want to add that. :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 05:03, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, it hardly needs to be proposed again, does it? ;-)

More to the point, Misplaced Pages's consensus model has certain failure scenarios that the community has been unable to address by mere incremental modification. The consensus-building process inherently relies on the BRD model—in other words, gradual change is achieved by a series of changes which are contested and individually resolved. The key here is the "Revert" portion; if it is replaced with something other than merely a reversal of the original change—such as, say, a block or desysopping—the model begins to break down quite rapidly. (Or, alternatively: the model works only insofar as the initial bold change can be performed without costing the user making it their ability to participate in the discussion and/or the project.)

This is a very significant practical issue with policies that govern (or describe, if you prefer) the use of certain privileged access rights. Ordinary policies—which is to say, those dealing with editor actions—are fairly amenable to such individual-driven change. Policies dealing with administrative tools are less so; people being unduly bold with them tend to wind up desysopped. At the far end of the scale, the policies dealing with things like oversight and checkuser access are effectively set in stone, since any deviation from them invites all manner of highly unpleasant consequences.

Consider, for example, the current debate on whether inactive admins should have their access to the tools removed. Such a policy (not policy document, but rather actual in-practice policy) cannot feasibly develop through the BRD approach; no steward would "boldly" desysop a few users merely because they thought it a good idea. And so any attempt at change devolves to establishing consensus a priori—which, for a change of this magnitude, draws in more people than can actually come to a reasonable consensus through ordinary discussion, leading to the predictable no-consensus referendum outcome.

(More generally, one can argue about whether certain policy should lean towards the prescriptive rather than the descriptive side of the spectrum—conduct policy, if made truly descriptive, would lean rather too much towards an unpleasant lowest common denominator—but that's really secondary to the practical issues with the current model.) Kirill 08:10, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree wholeheartedly with Kirill. The wiki-"consensus" model is fine for editing articles, and it works very well on a small scale. But when we have to co-ordinate policy changes across a vast community with thousands of members, "consensus" doesn't work, and we need a more formal and regulated system. Walton 08:17, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

At 2,346,917 articles; 12,895,573 pages; 218,874,408 edits; 782,443 media files (excluding commons); 6,970,823 registered users; of which 1,538 have administrative tools; over a period of 8 years numbers will have changed by the time I hit submit, I kind of like your concept of small scale. O:-) And that's just what has worked up till now. You're arguing it won't continue to work in future? Heh. :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 15:19, 25 April 2008 (UTC) The same argument was made around the time when we had just 1M articles. I guess we managed the next million without too much trouble. I figure the next million after this will work out too, we're already partway there. "Misplaced Pages can never work"; "Misplaced Pages is doomed". Yeah right! :-P

The small scale here is the 4 people discussing some article, as opposed to the large scale discussions of policy. There is an emergent effect that allows those small interactions to scale to something extraordinary of course, unfortunately for policy no similar emergent effect exists. (although I am slightly interested in the old Misplaced Pages:Delegable proxy scenarios) - cohesion 22:33, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Please, no more "Misplaced Pages is not a democracy" BS

I hate it when someone says it. Originally, this phrase was meaningful, and the meaning was, "ok, we cannot really tell if people vote twice, so we have to be careful about that, so we cannot decide things by simply voting". But now it's being used as a "victory" argument, when some minority wins, regardless if majority had a different opinion, especially in more subjective matters (and there is lot of them). Also, as in this proposal, it is used as an "obvious statement" which protects the proposal from outcry of admins, who feel democracy is threatening their position (and if you don't believe many many admins feel that way, see informal vote about admin recall of RfA page - large majority of normal users wanted such feature, but large majority of admins were against it).

Misplaced Pages needs more democracy, that's it. Democracy is a natural extension of consensus model, which works fine for small communities. Some will say that democracy means rule of the majority. Yes, but the only other possibility is rule of the minority. Which one do you prefer? I prefer rule of the majority to rule of the minority, because majority is more probably right and more probably, I will be a member of it. To prefer minority rule over majority rule is very elitist position, contrarian to the spirit of good faith in people on Misplaced Pages. I know that losing a vote hurts, but if you are reasonable, you will win most of the voting because of the majority rule.

So, I wouldn't bother building a legislative body - they tend to fail in the real world, and will probably fail here too (there is a big difference if you vote for a person and if you vote for an issue, because in the former, you have to implicitly trust that someone, in the latter, you don't have to trust, which is a good thing).

Instead, I would like to see 2 things:

1. Establish very precise rules for decision-making by voting when consensus cannot be reached. This means rules for who exactly is eligible to vote (based on number of edits, say 200, or some other metric - it doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be exact), how to make proposals for voting, how the votings have to be announced (so people would know about them), how long they will take and how to penalize the sockpuppets. ArbComm should probably decide contentious votings, and that should be it.

1. Unrelated thing, but also good. Further divide the powers of administrators, so that banning and article deletions/protections has to be done by different people.

Samohyl Jan (talk) 06:26, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

So you'd like to replace the consensus by a majority? As a member of a consensus group, you have the ability to influence every decision in detail. As a member of a democratic minority, you might not be able to influence a decision at all. So you're essentially proposing that we effectively disenfranchise you in particular situations, with no appreciable gain for yourself. ;-)

Are you sure that that's what you really want? --Kim Bruning (talk) 07:55, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Kim, that's a false opposition. Consensus and democracy are not opposites. When you have a small organization, where people can take the time to consider the issues and negotiate and resolve disagreements, consensus process can be exhilarating. But as years pass and precedents pile up, not to mention decisions that are made and considered the "status quo," true consensus rules can become highly conservative and oppressive even in small organizations. Misplaced Pages doesn't generally seek true consensus, but this happens even with the rough consensus that we use. Basically, when the status quo favors an active group, that group can block any changes. Essentially, what started as consensus rule becomes minority rule, where a minority, in the name of consensus, can continue a practice only supported, in fact, by a minority. The conclusion I came to, years ago, was that consensus was *important,* that the degree of consensus found is a measure of the success of the organizational structure, but that, ultimately, the decision of what decisions to make by majority rule and what decisions to make by other processes must bge up to ... the majority. If a majority are foolish, they will impose their ill-considered opinions on the minority. But if they majority is wise, it will respect consensus and seek it. The trick is: how?

In order to function efficiently without becoming a tight oligarchy, routine decision-making must be broadly distributed. This is how Misplaced Pages works. Decisions are made by rough consensus of those sufficiently interested to participate. It works well. Sometimes. Sometimes not. It is when it does not work well that something else is needed. we have escalating circles of dispute resolution, but they can become mob scenes, deliberation becomes practically impossible, and there is little way to determine if the results actually enjoy consensus. I.e., broad consensus. What happens instead is that increasing numbers of editors become burned out and disgusted with the process, which can take extraordinary energy to make even small decisions. The ideas that my friend introduced here were designed to deal with exactly this problem. It allows ad-hoc estimation of large-scale consensus based on small numbers of participants; it would allow what is basically the same structure as we have to continue to function when it works, with larger-scale involvement only as necessary. It does not introduce any bureaucracy, no elected offices, but, quite possibly, certain new practices and procedures for advising community servants. And for advising the Foundation, when necessary. This is WP:PRX, if the experiment is tried and applied. It is not about making decisions by voting. It's about estimating the consensus that any proposition might enjoy, if everyone had the time to actually become involved and make an informed decision, and it does this without elections or other contested process. Gee, I think it's a great idea. Wonder why so many wanted, immediately, to totally crush it? --Abd (talk) 16:13, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

No, I think Samohyl Jan is essentially right. The traditional nebulous concept of wiki-"consensus" works for a small community where everyone knows each other. It does not work for a project of this size and scale. What ends up happening is that those with power - usually the admins - make the decisions. And as regards policy changes, nothing ever gets done; it's impossible to build a "consensus" from the thousands of active members of the community. If we ratified policy changes by a majority vote, there would at least be some policy changes, and we could start fixing some of our broken processes.

I have been arguing for a long time that we need to end "Misplaced Pages is not a democracy", in its present form. It should probably be replaced with "Misplaced Pages is not a nation-state", emphasising the point that we are not primarily a political community, and that the encyclopedia is more important than developing rules of governance for their own sake. But democracy, in the form of majority voting on contentious decisions, is the only reasonable direction that this community can now take. Walton 08:15, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Size arguments thoroughly debunked on this page already :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 08:21, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

No, what's up on the page is a bunch of mildly interesting but not very meaningful statistics. It doesn't really make sense to simultaneously argue that editing a policy page is not prescriptive or significant to the policy itself, but also that the number of people editing that page has any meaningful correlation to the number of people involved in discussion of said policy.

Consider, for example, the blocking policy. It intimately affects hundreds, even thousands of editors every day; it is regularly debated on dozens of pages—user talk pages, noticeboards, arbitration cases; it lies at the root of dramatic conflicts among groups of editors; and yet most of this occurs away from the policy page itself! Certainly, neither the actual blockers nor the actual blockees are likely to be editing the policy (the former because they've presumably found what they needed in it, the latter because they can't). Kirill 08:58, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Kim, I think I haven't been clear enough in explaining what the "size argument" is. The data shows there are somewhere between 10k and 30k active editors on the site, depending on how you measure "active", as well as hundreds of thousands of occasional editors. The "size argument" is that the community has reached an overall size where some sort of representative system is the only responsible and effective way to make difficult decisions. Certainly, if everyone stays away from policy pages then things will look nice, but what that means is that instead of having a responsible, deliberative, representative group writing policy we have a self-selected, and often biased, group doing so. On the other hand, any time even 250 people decide to participate in a single discussion, no consensus is likely to be found.

The number of editors per article isn't relevant to that argument. You continue to claim the size argument is debunked, but I don't think you have actually addressed the argument that is being made. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:22, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

In the response to Samohyl Jan, Kim is right that, by advocating a representative system, individual editors would have less "power" in policy discussions than they do now. But I don't think that corresponds to being "disenfranchised". Any system we set up will need to have very strong provisions to protect significant minorities, and I would be happy if the deliberative group used a more formal consensus process, in which any one member could hold a proposal for discussion indefinitely. But the main concern that I have is the opposite of Kim's. Kim is concerned that a representative group would use policy making as a way to gain power. I am concerned that there are groups of individual editors who already do this, and would prefer to see them replaced with a more responsible and accountable group. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:29, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

That would be if it would be a solely representative system. I think this one is being proposed as being one in which representatives ultimately decide, but also one in which the broader community has a period in which it can discuss and express its concerns, much like the current ArbCom setup. That would allow all parties, representatives and otherwise, to have a very clear and noticable say. Regarding the "single-veto" proposal above, I might not go that far. If, however, the "veto" were based on the proposals flawed approach to type of subject or material, I have no doubt that the proposal would be altered to take into account the variations depending on subject, etc. And I agree that, right now, there do seem to be a small number of editors involved in writing policy, partially because the policy proposals aren't as obvious as they could be. By in effect making such policy writing better known, through elections, and probably more active discssions, the policy proposals would probably be better known and, very possibly, get even more input than they get today. But any step to bring it more transparent is probably a good thing, and this would probably help serve that goal. John Carter (talk) 15:39, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

So you would wish to discard consensus can change too? Ouch.

Also, note that advertising things too widely in a short timespan will basically kill any process (see discussions wrt dunbar's number earlier on this page). Don't Do That.

So if you first drag in more people than you can handle at once, and then try to fix that by tacking on a system to handle them, and then tangle with the problem that that system disenfranchises them to an extent... this is getting rather breathtaking. I think I need to sit down. --Kim Bruning (talk) 15:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

In response to Kim: As have been already noted above, democracy and consensus are not opposites, so it's not replacing consensus. Consensus, by narrow definition, is agreement of all parties, so if there was consensus and we would then vote about the proposal, everybody would vote the same. It's hence a special case of majority support, in this case 100% majority. Now in broader definition, it also means accompanied discussion and decision based on merits of the arguments. I don't intend to replace the discussion by voting, in fact, I think the rules should state clearly how long the discussion should take place before voting (but also, after how long discussion there should be voting, if there is disagreement). However, there is a problem - there has to be a body, which ultimately decides which arguments have good merit and which have bad merit. Obviously, if there is no such body, anyone can come along and say that his argument has merit, so there is just chaos. So you need such a body, and it also have to be completely neutral, with no interest in any issue. So the simplest such body is just to take fair aggregation of view of all interested people, ie. decide by voting. Any representation just murkies the idea who actually decides, so I oppose it. If the representatives should always follow the will of those who voted them in, then they are useless - we can as well decide directly, without need to trust them. If not, then the system is not fair, because then they don't represent the interests of whomever voted them in. So I want a direct democratic system because it is simple, fair and transparent.

Also, I would like to point out again as an example the proposal of admin recall. If there would be voting, it would be already decided in favour of recall. But there isn't such process, so anyone can come along and claim this or that proposal doesn't have consensus, because arguments on that side are wrong. In the meantime, we have a system that majority (including me) opposes. It's nice that you talk I am part of the consensus group, when I am not, because there is no consensus, just status quo. I don't see how this would be different (from my perspective) if I were overruled by majority, except that in the latter case, more people would be happy. Samohyl Jan (talk) 17:50, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

In addition, I would like to note that the democratic decision is not an end of the world. Fundamental property of democracy is reversibility - every law can be later redone (except laws for democratic process, obviously), if the people wish so. So if some minority would be overruled by majority, there would be a specified period (say, half a year), after which we could vote again about the issue (if, say, 5% people voting previously would want to), and this time, the arguments from minority could convince the majority. So this rule would be in sharp contrast to current practice which says "consensus can change", but doesn't say how to objectively recognize it has changed (for example - if there was 100 people coming, one each week, and saying, I don't like it, and each week, the same group of 50 people says, we like it in the response, is that a change in consensus?). That's precisely why such rules are needed, and majority voting itself is just one of them. Samohyl Jan (talk) 18:04, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The BLP claim is not true

The BLP claim is not true. There was a community consensus for it. See User talk:WAS 4.250/Archive 05#Talk:WP:BLP for details regarding its progress from creation to being policy. While it is true that the timing of its becoming policy was due to a push from Jimbo, none-the-less there was a community consensus for it and in time it would have been standard best practice and then elevated from guideline to policy as a descriptive policy. Jimbo pushing it to move from guideline to policy when he did sped up the process and thus made it a prescriptive policy. But there was community consensus for it and Jimbo's involvement merely sped up the process. "Forced on us from above" is nonsense. I created the initial proposal and I've never been an admin (and don't want to be). WAS 4.250 (talk) 12:39, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Your archived post there ends with "and its a policy because Jimbo wanted it to be a policy". Conversely, my impression is that WP:ATT is not policy only because Jimbo decided to yank it; if he had supported the policy tag on it, the tag would have remained. But we don't have any system other than Jimbo to promote a disputed proposal to policy; because as long as it's disputed, it won't become policy by consensus. In these situations our "consensus" system comes down to waiting to see which side of the discussion grows tired first, which I find very irresponsible. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:50, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The context of that archived post was me describing what happened when and why to someone interested in that. Above I flesh out "and its a policy because Jimbo wanted it to be a policy" in the context of a claim that it was forced on us explaining 1)it did have consensus 2}we normally promote a guideline after it becomes standard best practice rather than before 3)I was referring to when not that it was made policy so "and its a policy because Jimbo wanted it to be a policy" should be understood to mean "and it became a policy when it did because Jimbo wanted it to be a policy". WAS 4.250 (talk) 13:33, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Sure, it wasn't forced on WP out of the blue. Jimbo's seal is more useful for taking something that has significant agreement but not consensus, and convincing those who disagree to back down. I think that happened with the BLP policy but not with ATT. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:38, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, well said. Except on BLP rather than getting anyone to back down, his suggestion to make it policy was useful in preventing the creation of an opposition movement in the first place. There never existed significant opposition to BLP which is as David likes to say "a hard assed implementation of the other policies" and as he likes to leave out an insistence on treating living people like living people and not like a building or some other subject of an article (which was Daniel's original complaint - people told him they could edit his article anyway they liked so long as it met wikipedia policies and any harm it caused him was none of their concern). WAS 4.250 (talk) 13:53, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

It is actually quite possible to resolve such disputes rather more rapidly, by defining particular forms of blocking discussion as disruptive and thus blocking those editors (see Wikipedia_talk:Disruptive_editing#Blocking_consensus , User:Dmcdevit/On_edit_warring#Usefulness_of_repeat_protections). This is not the the only way to resolve such situations, just the most expeditious.

Actually, commonly there is merely a dearth of good faith, and resolving that will tend to solve the problem to quite a degree. (The list of documented procedures and manned systems to apply to that problem is rather long, so please forgive me for not linking here. Suffice to say that a little skill at mediation can go a long way. :-)

This way of approaching the problem can be and is already being used, and is also happens to be rather less invasive than turning the entire wiki-model on its head.

Which policy pages do you currently have the problem on?

--Kim Bruning (talk) 13:16, 25 April 2008 (UTC) I'm not saying it's the case here, but I have often noticed that the people complaining loudest about consensus being a waiting game, are actually involved in causing the problem in the first place. (This is statistically intuitive: the person who is {unintentionally} responsible for certain kinds of situation will tend to encounter it rather more often than others. ;-P )

What looks like 'blocking consensus' to one person may look like a good-faith objection to another. I don't see it as feasible to start blocking large swaths of editors in order to get some change I prefer moved into policy, especially sice I can be wrong sometimes.

One example at the moment, on which I am not involved, is the possible change to permit BLP articles to be deleted if there is no consensus to keep at an AFD. There are strong arguments on both sides there, so neither side is acting in bad faith. What we want to happen there is for a group of editors to carefully weigh our encyclopedic mission against the BLP issues and come to a difficult decision. I don't know which way that decision would go, it's genuinely hard. But the system we have doesn't encourage that sort of deliberative, responsible process for policy making. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Good faith objectors shouldn't be reverting every day, for instance, I would wager. (not even to The Consensus Version, not even to The Wrong Version). Nor should they be requesting page protection, I should think. And they shouldn't be wikilawyering about which policy xyz applies, or at least not longer than one or two posts, after which it should become clear to them that mere robotic behavior won't work (we have pywikipedia bot for that), and that they should start displaying some strong ai now.

Good faith people should be trying to work towards Consensus (which none of the above things are).

I do realize that some people might find that a novel concept.

--Kim Bruning (talk) 13:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC) I'm sure that xkcd would argue that import strong_ai should do the trick... but then why do we have humans here? Also, I'm skeptical about xkcd. I got an error when I tried to import antigravity . Very marginally on-topic, I had no luck with import soul either.

Ok, and the more direct problem at hand is BLP? I see. I'm starting to get the idea that BLP might be better off if we spun that off to wikinews entirely. But that's just my impression right now.

I'm willing to look into those discussions as well, if you like. Have you asked editor assistance or the mediation cabal for help already? (so that I don't accidentally cross someone else's work?) --Kim Bruning (talk) 13:56, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Short brroad-brush history of policy making at the English language Misplaced Pages

First we had no rules. Then some basic rules defining the project are make (the owner of the hardware, Jimbo, declares what that hardware will be allowed to be used for). Then rules get added based on existing best practice (we know the rules have consensus because these new rules are descriptive, not prescriptive). Then we get lots of new editors who take the rules to be rigid laws and apply them rigidly. Now changes to old rules can no longer occur though people gradually changing best practice because of rigid enforcement of an all encompassing set of rules. So now changes must be established as consensus by voting. But voting does not work when there is no way to establish who is an eligible voter. So we are increasingly stuck without a workable mechanism for changing existing rules. But that's not a crisis because the rules are quite good as they are. But for anyone who thinks they have a great new rule, they are frustrated by a lack of an easy was to get the proposed rule made into policy. Maybe that's for the best. Maybe it should be that hard to change our policies. WAS 4.250 (talk) 13:51, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually you can still document existing best practice using just normal wiki-rules for editing. Most of our current policy is still written that way, the process has never actually changed. At last count over 90% of policy and guidelines had been made and maintained using the normal wiki method.

Some people get a different impression, either because they've been pushing prescriptive practices, or because they have seen others do so (where those others have obviously been causing more heat than light)

--Kim Bruning (talk) 14:00, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and that's where the true problem lies. Perhaps my Welcome Template is a start towards fixing the problem where it began. Kurt Weber (Go Colts!) 14:04, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Kim, I agree. But I'm also raising the issue that a major change from existing policy can not be done though a gradual change in behavior anymore. WAS 4.250 (talk) 14:09, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Jimbo by panel

The Delegates as proposed are basically the new Jimmy. As he's basically off doing WMF, Wikia, and scuba diving with Tony Blair on Richard Branson's island, the proposal as formulated basically looks like a realottment of the authority he once enjoyed to the community in an official capacity. The community elects trusted delegates to x length terms; the delegates basically handle the dirty work of policy clarification, change, and implementation, and if it's a major change can draft a WP:3RR style vote for the community to decide. Behavioral stuff stays with the Arbcom. The Policy Delegates will not answer to Arbcom or to Jimmy, but if there's a legal question (GFDL, etc.) they can ping Mike Godwin. Grab your 15 to 50 most trusted, chuck 'em on 1-year terms, and let no one serve more than 2 consecutive terms to avoid stagnation, and I think you've got a winner. This is a great proposal. It's the epitome of community since it empowers the community to take supreme control of about everything in a fashion that will scale over a time frame of years. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 14:11, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

That sounds like what we wanted to happen in the first place. Someone should write a page for the proposal on exactly what would happen. STORMTRACKER 94 14:49, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

<Eyes the salesman on the doorstep> If I actually wanted a new Jimmy, that'd be totally true. But like, I don't want any Jimmys anywhere near policy anymore, that was totally a stopgap. Why would I want a new one? <looks rather suspicious> --Kim Bruning (talk) 15:05, 25 April 2008 (UTC) (I don't think JWales minds one bit that the community can take care of itself now :-) )

Calling it "Jimmy" was just a descriptive, really. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 15:35, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Why can't I just edit policy myself? Strange things, these wikis are. They work just fine for such mere trifles as multi-million page encyclopedias, but fail utterly for such important and complex things as describing how a single website works. --Kim Bruning (talk) 15:49, 25 April 2008 (UTC) Sarcasm? What sarcasm? O:-)

Because CCC in the classic sense and the old ways will be dead when we have 10 times as many people as a viable solution. Jimmy's hippy ways aren't going to scale up unfortunately. I think the point of this as I understand is to make the site viable in this regards no matter how big it gets. The bigger it gets, the more structured some things would I think need to be. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 16:18, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I completely agree with Lawrence Cohen above. Walton 21:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Bzzt

Lawrence cohen said:

Because CCC in the classic sense and the old ways will be dead when we have 10 times as many people as a viable solution.

Which possibly isn't going to happen for at least another 10 years or so, looking at statistics over time. Wikis tend to scale very well. (I'm not kidding. 10 years is a conservative estimate, in case we happen to be at the edge of some curve we can't quite see yet.)

Jimmy's hippy ways aren't going to scale up unfortunately.

Jimmy's hippy ways? Don't you mean Ward Cunningham et-al's rather well thought out patterns? wiki:

I think the point of this as I understand is to make the site viable in this regards no matter how big it gets. The bigger it gets, the more structured some things would I think need to be.

So why do you want to stomp all over the existing structure like an elephant, without even looking at it? :-)

--Kim Bruning (talk) 17:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I don't. Just weighing in, is all. But I fully support anything that would take policy-power out of the hands of the few and legitimately push it back into the hands of the many. The problems are that 1) a small group of wonks can stop policy talk; 2) the more people that join a discussion the more likely, as Kirill observed, that it will be an automatic no-consensus. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 17:56, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I thought you were taking it out of the hands of the many, and putting it in the hands of the few. I'm totally opposed to that, of course. --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:50, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

My understanding of this proposal as Matthew drafted it is the exact opposite. This would be the exact opposite of disenfranchising the few; it would disenfranchise policy trolls, policy wonks, and people that loiter in Misplaced Pages-space rather than building an encyclopedia to give the power to the masses to make policy decisions. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:52, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

But the "masses" (geesh) ... the wikipedia editors already have that power, they may collectively form consensus on any matter and carry it out. This proposal pulls that power out of their hands, gives it to some committee, and then (at the end of the day) it's thecommittee tells the editors what they're supposed to do, basically. Oh and in between that there's lots of voting yelling, and basic way-past-dunbars-number-human-condition going on too... erm... I'll shut up now. It's just I need this broswer window to test... and the temptation... <reaches for logout button> --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:02, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Graphical workflow of what the ideas "look like"

This is based on what all the ideas here kind of mesh together as:

How close is this to what everyone is envisioning? Lawrence Cohen § t/e 16:12, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

An observation on this: no one will be disenfranchised by such a system in any bad-faith sense. Since "one" voice or a small minority of voices shouldn't have more weigh or authority than any other comparable group of the same size or large on the wiki, the only people who would be disenfranchised by such a system is the group of policy-wonks that tend to currently dominate policy changes and discussions--the policy "regulars" would be made partially redundant and kicked down to the level of everyone else. This is not a bad thing, in the grand scheme. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 16:27, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I would strongly oppose the creation of a power structure such as that.(Though I have to say that without a touch of "this or that", I might support it.) My main concern is its role in the creation of policy. I still would prefer that this group just be a "review board", and possibly also as a braintrust that other groups (such as arbcomm) might solicit opinion from. - jc37 16:39, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I oppose that and any attempt to create a Parliament or any other sort of decision making body along these lines. I'd like to see something in which we could get the whole community to engage with policy creation, but not a parliament. The wiki process, and it pains me to admit this, is the best we've got at the moment. Although we need a better method for tracking all the changes. Misplaced Pages has certainly outgrown the watchlist model. Hiding T 16:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, this map is sort of exactly what we have now. Policy proposal > Discussion > Determine consensus > policy change goes live. This is sort of just a stewarding of it, but on a scale that may theoretically scale up to many x times the number of users we have, and seems (based on what everyone has said here) to be an attempt to strip away some of the anarchy in the process, to prevent any small group or lone users from stopping policy change. Stopping lone wolves or small interest groups on-wiki from blockading policy change alone would make something like this worthwhile--we don't need policy wonks. What don't you like about this? I'm torn on the overall idea myself, even though I'm more in favor in general of structure to things rather that chaos. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 16:49, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

If step 3 were also sent down to a vote/poll to determine acceptance, so that this group were more a bunch of Policy Stewards, or simply trackers/gatekeepers to major policy change, would that be less offensive? A Policy Steward body would be more appealing to me personally. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 16:50, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

A modified workflow based on this feedback:

Lawrence Cohen § t/e 17:05, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

(multiple ec's later)I share some of the concerns of JC, Hiding, and maybe others above, but probably not to the degree that the editors themselves necessarily do. In terms of creation of new policy, I think that, if the model were enacted, the initial "drafts" of new policies would almost certainly be in most cases a simple statement of a behavior or other standard, and possible exceptions to that standard which would emiliorate the situataion. But having a body which could draft policies for discussion, and at the same time hopefully ensure that the drafts don't have huge defects in them which have to be altered later, would probably be a good thing.

I do think that if there were a specifically designated "review period" for editors in general, most of the concerns they express would almost certainly be considered, up to and including rejection of the current draft. I think that it should be made a bit clearer that the community input section would be ongoing throughout the period of a policy being considered, up to and including the !voting itself. But I agree that this would open up the discussions more. There are other ways to do that, including a new WikiProject noticeboard, which can and should be added to any number of other pages, and the like. But that noticeboard, when placed everywhere it should be, and the Signpost, which could probably run a regular bit on the policy proposals, developments, etc., should both increase the level of involvement and participation of editors, while at the same time ensuring that the current stagnation ceases. I have some concerns regarding some of the ancillary details, like size, whether ArbCom members and bcrats would get in automatically, possible development of other governmental entities, and the like, but most of those can be dealt with later. The flow chart looks like a good starting point, even if some of the details clearly need to be worked on, like maybe the additional step Lawrence proposed above, which I don't have any objections to adding, with one proviso. In the event the process were started by a request/demand for a policy from Jimbo, ArbCom, the legal office, or some similar entity, then the Stewards might be allowed to vote for the proposal at the end, if the statement from Jimbo or ArbCom were to somehow indicate that such a policy, even a very basic, undeveloped one, were somehow necessary.

And, to specificy what I meant by ancillaries above, as I expect there will be questions, I'm thinking of group makeup, numbers, removal of members of the body for misconduct, and the possibility of members recusing themselves from certain discussions. Also, it might help if we had a group of specifically designated Arbitration and policy enforcers, and standards for enforcement, like ensuring parties with apparent, if not necessarily real, possible conflicts don't try to to enforce arbitration decisions regarding parties or issues with which they have conflicts. Doing so would help ensure that the appearance of COI doesn't happen very often, if at all. The latter development would probably be "liberating" in a sense as well, as someone being considered for AE would be able to be a bit surer that there would be no "action by enemies" involved. I think that any real proposals which really do limit freedoms in a unnecessary, potentially damaging way, which I don't think these do, would probably be dismissed unless there were obvious need for it for whatever reason. But, in terms of the negative effects of creating new policy/guidelines, having a clearer idea of what they are in advance, and what the consequences of acting contrary to them are, is generally much more liberating than finding out after the fact that you've done something wrong which you can be penalized for. John Carter (talk) 17:10, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

(Looking over the new chart) - For one thing, I would split the election of the committee members and the tasks of the committee members to two separate charts (they're separate concepts to discuss)

So for the latter topic:

• A. "Request for policy and guideline review" (PAGRV): A request for a guideline page to be reviewed to become policy OR concerns about an existing policy page come to light
• B. (possibly) a request for an essay to be reviewed to become a guideline, or a guideline review to become an essay. (I say possibly, because we may wish to leave essay/guideline discussions solely with the community, with the PAGRV committee merely being solicitied for an opinion on policy.) Acting as mediator/arbitrator concerning only policy/guideline, and not the actions of editors involved - which would instead be arbcomm's jurisdiction
• C. The PAGRV committee is requested by arbcomm, or some other group, to offer a "finding" and/or "principle" concerning policy and/or the interpretation of policy.
• D. WMF (or some such personage or body) has determined that a guideline (or some core concept) should be or become policy (I'm strongly tempted to remove this section, as I really don't like the idea of this review body even coming close to "creating" policy or even a policy page. Perhaps this could be downgraded to PAGRV supervising the organisation of a panel/project to create a policy page, upon request of WMF, or whomever, and then reviewing that panel's results, and presenting both the results and the review to the requesting body.)
• E. A - D lead here, to a "presentation" page (a combination of arbcomm's evidence and workshop) which anyone can edit.
• F. E leads here, to a discussion between the members, with community allowed discussion on a related talk page (comparable to "final decision" in arbcomm, or a bureaucrat chat)
• G. Resolution/Interpretation/Opinion presented.

This essentially is (roughly) how Featured article process works, Arbcomm works, and a host of other examples. It's inclusive of the community, while having a set of individuals acting as the "closers" to the discussion (rather than just a single individual, such as Jimbo Wales (in the past, and, though rarely, sometimes the recent present), or an admin (XfD), or a bureaucrat (RfA), or whatever.)

Review = reviewing a page to see whether it meets/falls within a.) Foundation principles b.) current general usage c.) the current policy framework d.) current community consensus, etc.

If I'm missing something, please ask for clarification : ) - jc37 17:59, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

FA doesn't scale at all, it's a one man show (two man now). Arbcom does not scale and has needed replacing for quite some time. (We've shored it up by reducing the workload with layers of mediation, some of which does scale, but that's really not the way to go in the long run). If you are hell-bent on making a new system, please at least base it on something that isn't about to fall apart. :-P --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:12, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

What happened to the Kim Bruning who was suggesting that we look to the policy and process already in place? Or are we cherry-picking what "we" prefer? : P - jc37 18:29, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

LOL no! You totally have the right idea going there. And I guess we totally should discuss arbcom, FA, and also *FD... all of those have (had) scaling issues. And that's a totally interesting fact, I suppose. --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:44, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

We can, and I'd probably enjoy the discussion : )

But talking about "scale", consider what we're discussing: Policy pages.

Now compare the number of policy pages to the number of editors who get into disputes, or the number of pages up for deletion, or even the number of FC up for review.

Thousands or millions compared to what, several dozen?

Honestly, my main concern is that the members (if they only focused on their committee work) would be twiddling their collective thumbs. But with the addition of being a support body to arbcomm (and others), I think they'd be kept fairly busy : ) - jc37 18:55, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The one advantage, of course, to not keeping them busy on committee work is that they would be less likely to suffer burnout from doing too much committee work. I personally think that the proposal would be best if it resembled what the US Congress started as, a group of "part-timers" who give up some of their time to write the bloody policies and guidelines, but get to spend much/most of their time doing something else, which they're probably more interested in anyway. John Carter (talk) 18:59, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

current method

The current method to maintain policy pages is documented at Misplaced Pages:Consensus, and that page (and many pages like it) are being maintained by that very process right now. :-) (It'd better be, if we don't even trust our own dogfood, we're lost.)

The advantage of that method is that it works, and that it works now.

This method is characterized by quick turnaround, the ability for anyone to contribute at any time, the ability to teach people about the policy by allowing them to directly modify it, and many more besides. This method has been used to create 90% of our policy pages or more, as well as over two million encyclopedia pages. It is proven, fast, well tested, and resilient even under continuous pressure by vandals. It also scales extemely well, because it lacks central choke points or particular time requirements.

There are also several extensions and improvements that have been devised over a period of 8 years that are built upon this system. Several processes and systems have been designed around it or built upon it.

Before we abandon current best practice, perhaps it should be studied more closely. Just because you are trying things at random and failing doesn't mean that an existing process isn't already documented. :-)

--Kim Bruning (talk) 18:08, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

You know I love you, Kim, but this is a classic example of what I meant by one person burying a proposal or change with "machine gunned criticism". :) No one is as heavily commenting on this as you, and it's beginning to drown out the page. ;) The tenacious should not win simply for being tenacious. :) Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:35, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh my. I was actually considering scaling back on my replies, I guess you noticed too. I have some coding to do too, so possibly I might go off and do some of that. There's just so many issues with this particular proposal, I don't really know where to start. :-/ Anyway, this particular section wasn't too critical, was it? --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

No, not too critical. I'm more in favor of decentralized but structured control, you're more in favor of just decentralized control. Apples and oranges, both good for you. Just a question of what vitamins are best for our job. :) Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:54, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Majority = consensus

I think that's a big part of the disconnect. Which is more important to us on discussions, and policy changes? Getting your opponents on board, or going by what the majority wants? Tricky. If the majority want a given change, but the minority don't, what should matter more? What the majority want, or the concerns of the minority? Should a minority be able to quash the majority, as commonly happens now? This is one of the reasons I tend to not weigh in much on policy stuff after some aborted attempts. I've seen too many discussions where 15, 20 people endorse something, and some loudmouth 1-5 people come in with a machine gun of complaints and bury the changes. It ends up being a situation where the most dedicated, overwrought (I'm no less guilty on that mark, unfortunately, cf my RFA), or persistent people win, even if their wishes don't align with the majority.

It has the net effect of the users who spend the vast bulk of their time on policy pages running the show. This is not a good thing. Everyone knows the folks I'm talking about, as well: look at their contributions, and of their last 1000, 90%+ will be to Misplaced Pages/Wikipedia talk pages. Our current model rewards the tenacity of the vocal minority rather than the will of the majority. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:02, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Example. If I edit a policy page so that it now reads, in full: "poop". Does the policy change? --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:19, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

With the current system, no, certainly not - it would be instantly reverted, and the page has to stabilise before the changes are meaningful, whatever meaning you see them as having. With the proposed system (at least, by my understanding, which differs from some), if the assembly voted to change the policy page to "poop", then that would be the new policy (for as long as it took for people to IAR and get the hell rid of the insane assembly). --Tango (talk) 18:27, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually the policy just stays the same old, no matter what change you make to the page. People will do whatever they like, and what they do is what's called policy. The page just documents what they do. Like any other wiki page, it can fall behind, be vandalized, etc etc... --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:34, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but: I think lately from things I've seen is that there is more of a shift that policy as written, in an accepted form, to be enforceable. This sort of proposal would be that sort of thing. It's really more of a cultural proposal change than a silly new process. "If the majority says policy is this, you need to do this, and thats that." Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:37, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Right. But that's not really a good idea, is it? That basically disenfranchises up to 49% of all Wikipedians. (And that's the optimistic version :-P ) --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:41, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, 51% isn't a clear majority, though. If you applied RFA-type pass/fail standards, it would be a whole other game. If you had 100 people all vote on a change to a given policy that is not a WMF/legal matter, and 80 to 90 of them endorse the change, that's it, game over: change should be done. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Sure, people can do whatever they like, but they'll end up getting blocked for it. --Tango (talk) 18:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, majority certainly doesn't equal consensus - that much is easy. If there is a consensus on a matter, then the way forward is clear. If there isn't, then the first step is to try and form one (ie. discuss, convince and compromise until everyone is a least willing to go along with it). The problems arise when we are unable to do that and it's then that we have to decide between doing nothing or using something other than consensus for decision making. At the moment, we generally fall back on polls, but they rarely go well. This proposal is an alternative method for dealing with situations without a consensus. --Tango (talk) 18:27, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

If there's no consensus, we can wait. m:Eventualism :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:35, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

In some cases, sure, but not in all. Sometimes the status quo is the worst of all the options. --Tango (talk) 18:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Also, Kim is taking it for granted, possibly fallaciously, that, while waiting for "eventualism" to triumph, we don't have the ship sinking as a result of a problem which has arisen while we're waiting for eventualism to kick in. Realistically, I think we have to admit that just putting everything off till later will almost certainly have the consequence of creating additional problems we don't need, and could have resolved earlier, had we not been almost religiously relying on eventualism to ultimately save everything. This is particularly important if what we're relying on eventualism to solve is a legal matter which could potentially destroy the project immediately. John Carter (talk) 18:49, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Curiously, that ATT poll had what, 67% support? What if that had been 90%? If Jimbo had come along to quash the ATT move then, what would have happened? He would have been out of bounds and the community would have been within their power to quash him in return. Majority certainly can equal consensus, and should, but our systems and discussion methods are setup in a way that encourages watering down of strong ideas by discussion for (often) pointless discussions' sake, and with our harebrained "voting is evil" methodology, it often discourages people from expressing if they simply do support something. Not all decisions require 100kb of discussion per person; not all changes require 10 pages of archives. That discourages many people from joining in. If someone does 800 edits a month, 600 to articles, 100 to various user/article talks, and at best 100 to Misplaced Pages spaces, why shouldn't his opinions on a policy matter carry the same weight as say Kim, or Until 1=2, or Ned Scott, who tend to spend as much time on Misplaced Pages internal matters as our example editor spends on articles? We are all supposed to be exactly equal here. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:42, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

(In reply to Lawrence) This somewhat simplifies the issue with changing policy. It is rarely a case of X% support and Y% oppose, it is usually in multiple shades of gray. A% support the whole thing, B% oppose the whole thing, C% support parts 1 and 5, D% supports parts 2 and 3, E% supports parts 2 and is strongly opposed to part 1, etc. You could rewrite the proposal to exclude the parts that got the least support, but then the people who supported the parts that were removed may no longer support it or a completely different group of people might give their opinions. There's also the issue of "what is consensus?" This was one of the major problems with the rollback discussion. Unless you do it as a straight Yes or No vote like ArbCom elections, the more people that get involved, the bigger variety of opinions you get and the less likely you are to get consensus for any one idea. This is also why WP:RFC/U is the worst discussion format we have, it basically encourages this. Mr.Z-man 18:30, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Was the 3RR vote a good thing or a bad thing? Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:37, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

That's a meaningless question - there is no such thing as "good" and "bad", just "better" and "worse". You need something to compare it with. --Tango (talk) 18:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Fine, compare the 3RR vote to the ATT vote. The 3RR vote appears successful, passed, and from poking around old stuff, didn't appear that controversial. See also the vote for the Main Page redesign. Compare to ATT, where everyone fought like mad, mainly over not giving up community control to a vote: reading that was painful. It seemed like the anti-vote was as much "voting is evil" dogma as it was some people refusing to yield policy control to the unwashed masses. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:50, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

(ec) If your change has 100% support, it might still not be policy. (a textbook example happened recently with the recent NFCC policy page, where 100% of those present supported an alteration, but the alteration got reverted anyway. ) --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:39, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Diff? NFCC is a legal/WMF matter, however. Those are immune to consensus. If you had 40 people all endorse a change to WP:NPA with 100% support, and one person reverted it out to stonewall, that one person is as they say here in the States, "Shit out of luck." Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:44, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

What? No fillibuster? (sorry, had to : ) - jc37 18:47, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, yeah. Filibustering is not a productive thing on here. :) Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I wasn't involved in that particular case, but surely the person that reverted didn't support it, so there wasn't 100% support... --Tango (talk) 18:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, lets say 25 people endorse a change to BLP and I say, "Hell no." and try to stonewall. How far should I be able to take that? Lawrence Cohen § t/e 18:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Potentially? all the way through the DR process, to arbcomm, if necessary. Here's the thing, though. Arbcomm will tell you that they don't decide which version is "right". So as you said above, eventually, you're SOL. Better go make some friends (grin). - jc37 18:58, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Exactly, bingo. And this sort of process would make it so that no one is ever SOL, in that way, since any good-faith policy change could get a shot at being heard before the whole community, as I read it. It'd make policy edit warring pointless; it'd make sure that crappy changes or changes that some people push through to benefit their own Wiki-interests get quashed; and it would make sure that only broadly-supported changes go through, and none by anyone's fiat. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 19:00, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Exactly! FloNight♥♥♥ 19:02, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Then that's "policy review", not "policy creation". Since that'd be reviewing the edits made. Or am I missing something? - jc37 19:15, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Policy is created either by someone posting a proposal, and the majority of users endorsing it; or someone drafting a policy that reflects practice, and the majority of users endorsing it. It doesn't really matter if one person drafts it, or two, ten working in a team, or 50 working in a panel, though, does it? If the policy itself or a change to policy has legs, regardless of how it originated, it will either fly or it won't. Let's say some guy that has a Great New Idea (to him) for policy, but not a lot of great knowledge to socialize and implement this under the current, present day model. He can come to these Stewards, or Gatekeepers, or Delegates, or whatever we call them, and put it up for review: "This is my great idea!" If it's sound, the clueful people we elect after consideration can put it forth in a well-worded manner to the masses: "Do you guys want this? Does this reflect the Misplaced Pages you live in, or want to live in?" Then we all, the body members included, decide.

Another thing that this reform proposal strikes me as: rather than small policy changes languishing forever in back-corners of Misplaced Pages, this will throw them out to the public broadly. If there are five policy changes in a month on a "docket", for lack of a better term, this will let the interested public possibly look them over in one centralized place.

At least that's how I read it. Taking away the backroom dealing, taking policy control out of the hands of the backroom, out of the very few and giving it up to all. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 19:55, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

But anything on a policy page isn't binding because it's on a policy page, it's "binding" because that's what everyone does. So no matter how much backrooming goes on (which I assure you isn't as much as you'd think :-P ) , it wouldn't make a whit of a difference. That's a misunderstanding a couple of people have. Oh... sorry.. I was supposed to be coding... getting back to that. :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 19:58, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

You know, I've heard a lot of people say that there isn't that much being done in secretive, furtive, concealed locations as a lot of people think. And they're probably right. And if all those freaking idiots out there who seek this silly thing called "transparency" could just accept that they don't need to know anything that goes on in the backrooms, we'd all be happy. Why, oh, why, can't they realize that they're better off being kept in the dark about these matters? ;) John Carter (talk) 20:02, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The secret is that there are no backrooms for this kind of thing. By assuming that there are, and acting on it, you're actually shooting yourself in the foot. (oops) --Kim Bruning (talk) 20:04, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The key problem with the proposed model

An elected body of representatives? Seems to blankly contradict the fact that Misplaced Pages is not a democracy. Anyone who wants can participate in policy reform and creation, and that's way it should be. Policy comes organically from within the community, and to do otherwise violates the basic principle of operation that has made this project successful. Laying the power to alter/create policy in the hands of delegates alone is not something I would ever accept, even if that process includes a ratifying vote. VanTucky 20:20, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Every one can add content, yes. That everyone can be directly involved in all the other process has not scaled as the Project grew. FloNight♥♥♥ 20:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

But handing over the responsibilities that ArbCom and the sysops each respectively have has disenfranchised no one's ability to have their direct say in the formation of the policy that governs Misplaced Pages, it simply handed additional powers to a few to enforce that policy. ArbCom, admins and others only act on the basis of policy that is open to reform by everyone. Taking away the rights of everyone to reform and create policy is cutting the legs off of what makes those systems equitable. VanTucky 20:57, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Where in Kiril's proposal (as mocked up in my silly little graphic as close I could) does it indicate anyone loses control? If anything, this gives MORE control to MORE people over policy content. The only people who will lose theoretically are the policy wonks that sit on the policy pages all day, as they'll no longer be primarily in control of and stewarding the pages. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 21:00, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I read the draft graphic before. Yes, I lose the ability to just hit the edit button and be bold in updating this content. A proposal which takes the ability of all to edit policy, and adds a bureaucracy that will stop users and say, "no, you have to jump through these legislative hoops to get policy changed" is something I oppose 100%. Policy on Misplaced Pages is not legislation, and I don't want it turned to that either. I don't care how you frame it, but any forced process whereby the power over policy is in the hands of delegates is bad. The point is: the privilege to edit policy directly is power over that policy. I'm not handing that power directly in to the hands of a select few, be they elected or no, without a fight. There's simply no pressing reason why I should. VanTucky 21:20, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

How do we deal then where you have one person or some ultra-minority that doggedly wear out and nuke any proposed policy change until everyone gives up on it, or the ones where some out of the way group works to ram through their own policy shifts and then goes to war until their other opponents give up? Should victory go to the policy wonks, policy trolls, and the people who are willing to sit and fight for months on end? Or should ultimate authority over policy reside with the collective masses, and to have shifts in policy presented in a centralized manner for them to decide? Lawrence Cohen § t/e 21:23, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

It's not having a centralized location to discuss policy changes that I oppose. It's creating a specified step-by-step bureaucratic process (which will inevitably require much instruction creep) to do so, and more importantly, having to protect that bureaucracy by handing over the power to edit policy to a select group of delegates. I would much rather see the way policy is handled stay the way it is (by those interested enough to devote time and energy) than see another bureaucratic process and a hierarchical position of power created. Again, the way policy is handled on Misplaced Pages is just another thing that shouldn't work (at least when you describe in the terms you just did), but in my opinion, it does. VanTucky 21:28, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

You may feel that policy governed by the dedicated people that loiter on policy pages and are willing to get into months-long battles over the odd sentences works, but consensus apparently (so far) on this page seems to be counter to that. Why should policy be governed by people who are willing to babysit policy pages to deflect any and all comers? It engenders policy ownership, and falsely, inappropriately, and unethically empowers long-time users or the simply persistent who fight on pages until everyone gives up. That's the very definition of a problem, because it de-powers anyone from affecting policy that isn't willing to fight through weeks or months of trolling and conflict by vocal minorities. Look at the massive outcry from a very small number of users that comes up whenever people try to strengthen WP:BLP as a good example. You may not think BLP needs tightening, and they may not think it, but any system that allows a handful of people to derail a change from a much, much larger group is flawed. We need a way to smoke out the policy rats that will cause this ship to sink when we add more and more people; some sort of system that makes it so established every user has an exactly equal voice in the policy making process--without them having to spend 12 weeks doing battle with a couple of users. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 22:19, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Again, I'm of the opinion that the proposed alternative is much, much worse than the present way of doing things. I don't want an elected bureaucrat holding court over the policy that I am obliged to follow and enforce. I want to be able to participate directly in shaping it, and I don't mind that occasionally letting all have access to it creates a problem. It's still a net positive. Again, the sausage making metaphor is applicable here. If the way policy is edited, created, and approved is so awful, then why is our policy so good? And yes, I do think our policies are, as a whole, very very good. That's part of why I wanted to become an admin. VanTucky 23:04, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I hate adding extra bureaucracy. I'll oppose it almost every chance I get. However, from my recent experiences, getting policy changed in any significant way is virtually impossible. Right now the people who are willing to fight the longest win and in the majority of cases those are the people fighting to maintain the status quo. We are a dynamic content website with fairly static policies. That isn't good IMO. Mr.Z-man 23:34, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

If it's not a democracy, what is it then? You think people come here and invest their time so that some other people would command them? If so, it is at least immoral, and I find it offensive that you would agree with such practice. Also, you're misquoting - the original statement was "Misplaced Pages is not an experiment in democracy", which has completely different meaning. Samohyl Jan (talk) 09:09, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Power

Just curious. Is this proposal an attempt to expand consensus, and fill a current possible vaccuum in the process, or is it entirely about who should have the "power" over policy?

The more I read the discussions, it's starting to appear to be a case of "I want somebody to be in charge, so that (the enemy) can't stop me from doing what I wanna do."

Is this really what's being proposed?

A caveat: I've faced similar situations, and have been rather disgusted that a single POV-pushing editor can stop clarity or growth.

But to deal with this concern we're going to set up a student council, or possibly an elective dictatorship?

Would one of the original proposers please clarify this for me? - jc37 21:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I think you've slightly misinterpreted it. We all agree that the wiki-consensus model works fine for the vast majority of decisions taken on the site - content decisions, etc. But for major policy changes, or the adoption of new policies, it is incredibly difficult to build consensus when you have hundreds or even thousands of participants in a discussion. There's no formal process for adopting policy; strawpolls are almost always inconclusive, and a vocal minority can block changes desired by the majority. In other words, what Misplaced Pages lacks is an effective legislative process. We're simply proposing an elected council to fill the legislative gap in Misplaced Pages. Obviously, everyone would have input into policy-building, just as they do now; but it would be the council who would vote on it and make the final decision. Walton 21:54, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Misinterpreting? I look at my post above, and my comment about a "student council", and I look below and see what? A student Misplaced Pages council. I know you're a strong proponent for Democracy on Misplaced Pages, you've made no bones about it. But that's not the "wiki-way", which is, by the way, a foundation issue. I strongly doubt that any sort of legislative body is going to fly. - jc37 10:36, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

When the heck have we ever had hundreds or thousands of participants descend on a page without first having to be prompted by drastic measures (sitenotice for instance) ?

If inviting hundreds or thousands of people all at once b0rks your precious proposal... then... Don't Do That Then! Invite people a couple at a time and discuss properly with all of them. :-)

You're basically first causing your own problem, and then proposing to turn wikipedia upside down to solve your own problem that you caused for yourself in the first place ;-)

--Kim Bruning (talk) 22:06, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Discuss and get buy-in from all or most participants? Never. The problem is the community should never on any discussion or process shift be held hostage by a vocal minority. If a policy, decision, or action is sound for the whole, showing it in plain language to the whole is perfectly fine. If the majority/community wants it, they'll take it. But we certainly will never need or desire detailed discussion-based buy-in from hundreds of users, the idea is absurd, Kim. We're not here to be social, and sway each others' views to our own, we're here to make an encyclopedia. If 90 people buy into something, 5 kind of do, 2 sort of dislike, and 3 vehemently are against it, too bad for the 3. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 22:12, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Doesn't that contradict your "SOL" comments? - jc37 10:36, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

A detailed proposal

Feel free to pull this apart/debate the details, but here is a general proposal based on the discussion above.

• The Misplaced Pages Council (sorry for the pretentious name; if anyone has any better ideas, feel free to suggest them) will be a body of 40 members, elected annually. (40 should be enough to represent a diverse range of views and avoid cliquery, while being small enough to be manageable.)
• The voting system used to elect Council members will be approval voting, the same as that currently used for ArbCom. Any registered user in good standing can vote and can stand for election; candidates do not have to be administrators.
• Major changes to a policy, or adoption of a new policy, will require a vote by the Council. The change will require a 75% majority (30 out of 40 votes) in order to pass. That last part is just a suggestion; I don't know whether we really need to require a supermajority or not. Please discuss.
• The Council will not vote on a policy change until the community has had an opportunity to discuss the proposal and refine it to its final form. Addition: However, the Council will, of course, have the power to amend the proposal before voting on it, or to pass an amended version. But they should take account of community opinion as far as possible. Walton 22:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
• A more controversial part: The Council will also have the authority to order the desysopping of an administrator, by a 75% majority vote. I realise many people will think this point is a bad idea, so please discuss.

This may sound both pretentious and bureaucratic, but I believe it's what we need, considering the failings of the current wiki-legislative process. And from the discussion above, it looks like there's a rough consensus for it. Walton 22:02, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The desysopping should stay with arbcom, I think. The legislative body should be for making policy. FloNight♥♥♥ 22:16, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

On reflection I think you're right; ArbCom is the "judicial branch", such as it is, and so it's probably better-placed to deal with such issues (which may require complex investigation). Walton 22:19, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

We don't need ArbCom in the first place. If we do decide to go ahead with this "judicial branch" idea, then arbcom needs to be re-elected and the terms shortened. Monobi (talk) 02:45, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

We don't have a wiki-legislative process in the first place. From the sound of it, having one fail sounds like a good idea. ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 22:08, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, this stems from your repeated insistence that policy is not in fact a prescriptive set of rules (a view you share, ironically enough, with Kurt Weber). However, as I stated earlier, I am firmly of the opinion that the rule of law is a desirable attribute in any community; rules must be clear, static and binding on everyone, including those in power, in order to prevent abuses of power and to allow users to know where they stand.

No one should ever be blocked, for instance, unless the blocking admin can point to a specific rule the blockee has violated; otherwise, how are new and inexperienced users supposed to know what is and isn't a blockable offence? A bad block can drive away a valuable contributor, and remonstrating with the blocking admin after the fact is often too late. So while some (particularly those who have been editing here since the early years, such as yourself) cling to the traditional model of informality, consensus and collegiality, it simply cannot work for a community of this size. (Or, more accurately, it can work, but it will lead to many good editors being driven away by abuses of power, and to problems not being fixed because of the community's inability to change things.)

Anyway, I don't want to re-hash the same discussion that you've had with about 20 different people in the threads above. I'm hoping for some broader input on this specific proposal. Walton 22:16, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Kim, I don't want to sound snippy, but do you have any criticism of this proposal beyond "We've never done it this way"? :( Lawrence Cohen § t/e 22:13, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't get this proposal. The community drafts the proposal and then they don't get to decide if it passes? This seems counter productive and counter intuitive. A two tier system won't work. You're looking to fix a problem that doesn't exist. The major problem on Misplaced Pages is one of factionalism. You won't solve that with any form of council or Parliament, you'll entrench it further. Hiding T 22:15, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree that factionalism is a big problem, but at the moment vocal minorities can prevent any change whatsoever. We are never going to eliminate factionalism, and we are never going to all agree on how to change policy. But policy does need changing; and going with the majority view is better than no change whatsoever. What this proposal will do is give us an effective method for changing policy, and prevent vocal opponents of the change from derailing it. Walton 22:18, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Hiding, that's not how I read the proposal, but I already asked Kiril who wrote it to weigh in. The way I read it is that the "Council" or whatever they're called in the end are the policy stewards. Anyone can propose a policy change, but it would (seem) to go in one central forum, rather than all over creation like it is now. Everyone weighs in that watches the page, and if it's some valid request/change/thing then it goes to the wider community to decide, like how we voted to adopt WP:3RR, and it goes "on the books". The method would make all policy-changes super-visible, and would make edit-warring over policy (as often happens today to try to quash change or enforce change) pointless. It basically will make all the Misplaced Pages Policy Wonks that guard their pet policy pages unemployed, and give full control to the masses. That's how I read it, anyway. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 22:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Some of the drafting of policy would be done by the Misplaced Pages Council, I think. But the Community would still have a large part in it as well. Certainly will have a place for the Community to make suggestions for changes or express disapproval. But in the end, if the Misplaced Pages Council approves it, the the new policy or re-writes would be made. Or course, further review and changes are possible after a trial period. FloNight♥♥♥ 22:28, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

For me the detailed proposal sounds quite reasonable, and not in the least bureaucratic. There's one difficult point however: that the community refines a proposal to its "final form" - this will probably run into old problems (there will be no consensus as to what is the "final form"). It's a good idea to have as much community input on proposals as possible, maybe even leading to alternate versions of a proposal for discussion - but the "Misplaced Pages Council" probably needs the option to modify proposals (or select from different variants) as needed for compromise. --B. Wolterding (talk) 22:21, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

You're right, I've added wording to that effect. Walton 22:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Election Committee

I think an election of this large a group will need a designated election committee. The Community can still assist but I think we need a group of users to be responsible for making sure the election is well run. Should the Election Committee be appointed by ArbCom after the users are self nom and discussed by the Community? How many? FloNight♥♥♥ 23:42, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

See what I mean about piling on the bureaucracy? Reason number three why I heartily oppose the proposal. VanTucky 23:57, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

VanTucky, this would decrease process wonk by removing power from the abusive ArbCom and giving it to the actual editors. Monobi (talk) 02:40, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Thankfully we already have a Election Committee. We call them Bureaucrats. Geoff Plourde (talk) 01:22, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

I was thinking more that, since ArbCom members can't be members of the Council as well (in order to ensure a separation of powers), one or two designated ArbCom members could supervise the elections. (Newyorkbrad might be willing to take on the job, I would expect). Whoever was designated as election clerk would, of course, have to be impartial and abstain from voting in the election. Walton 07:24, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Why this is unnecessary

This proposal seems to completely misunderstand what Misplaced Pages's policy-making method is at the moment. Apparently it has broken down -- this is a myth! There never was a policy-making method! It is said that the last policy to be created was BLP. How many others can you name? In my memory, policies that have been approved in this way can be counted on one hand -- 3RR, the Arbitration Committee, BLP. But policy has changed since BLP was instituted. For instance, the (misguided, IMHO) policy of community sanctions exists, even though it has never been put to the vote. It is practised and it works to a certain extent; certainly it is Misplaced Pages's practice, and the way it has always worked is that practice is policy.

This proposed change seems to me to be highly unneeded. The whole point about Misplaced Pages is that our entire way of working can be summed up in three words "ignore all rules". This isn't just a policy, or a recommendation, or a current working practice, it is also the way other policies, recommendations and working practices are formed.

If people are trying to find a way of fixing the broken method of creating policy -- the one that involves straw polls -- maybe they should question whether that actually is the way of making policy.

Sam Korn 12:56, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

That may have been how it worked initially. Now, ignoring all rules is becoming increasingly frowned upon, as policy is increasingly being seen as prescriptive, so changing policy by adjusting practice is frowned upon (because it means violating current policy). Changing policy by explicitly proposing policy changes doesn't work because all it takes is one reasonably-sized chunk of opposition to scuttle any policy change. Besides that, there are some things - BLP protection being the one that I'm most fond of invoking - that are too important, and currently not done well enough, to be left to the consensus process. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 13:03, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Can you name another? Four or five policies in seven years seems a bad reason to make this proposal.

The day that ignoring all rules ceases to be acceptable is the day Misplaced Pages dies. I have hardly ever -- in the best part of four years on the site -- read a policy page and I don't intend to start anytime soon.

Sam Korn 13:12, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Two questions

There are two questions here, to my view. First, is the current way things get done working to handle the large and important issues confronting the project? .. and second, if there is a problem with that, is this proposal the way to solve the problem?

I think the answer to the first question is yes. I think we have a building crisis with BLPs that we are not effectively coming to grips with. I think Kim (who above has been repeatedly (!!) saying "there is no problem, everything is fine") is wrong. The many attempts to put forward solutions to the BLP problem by prescriptive policymaking have failed, and I think most of us recognize there IS a BLP problem.

But the second question? No way. I think this proposed government structure is unimplementable, and if it were actually implemented, I think while it might be able to tinker round the edges, it would fail to come to grips with the actual important problems. So I oppose this solution. Policy here remains descriptive, and as long as you have influential people such as Sam, above, proud that they do not read policy pages, it's not likely that will change. No, I feel the same way about this as I do about the Wikicouncil proposal... not a good idea. ++Lar: t/c 14:16, 26 April 2008 (UTC)