Admin Heimstern has a beautiful summary of Wikipedia's problems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Heimstern/Problem

Would someone like to invite him here?

Quoting in case someone makes it "disappear" (and its not all that long anyway):

I'll shoot him off an e-mail.

Well, he hasn't quite got it. It's not that people have inflated egos per se, it's that the worst offenders in this regard are able to accumulate the most power. Many, indeed probably most editors on WP have little or no ego problem. Wikipedia has allowed kind of a feudal, petty warlord system to develop in its administration, which tends to reward those who are especially ruthless, assertive, ambitious and manipulative. The primary source of the problem, in my opinion, is the excessive delegation of power to individual admins, with no real community-based avenue of appeal. If admins were required to act more like functionaries with little individual authority, carrying out the community's will as simply and faithfully as possible, and having to reach a consensus decision on any controversial issue before taking action, the whole culture could be transformed.

But then hardly anyone would want to be admin. Hardly anyone would revert vandalism in hopes of getting power, etc.

Indeed, I ran a system on my old talker where admins had next to no real power, and that created 2 problems:
1) Everyone still insisted that secretly admins had lots of power, they just didn't know about it
2) Admins wanted more power, and tried to find sneaky ways to get more

In the end, they got what they wanted, and I left, and they insisted that with more power it was better.

If I had it to do again, I wouldn't have bothered with trying to make it fair. Just accept that corruption exists, and just give yourself power, and focus more on what you are trying to do rather than how you are trying to do it.

If you get rid of the power aspect, nobody much wants to be an admin. Some still do, but you need to have some incentive. You're not paying them.

I think where people complain is if you say one thing on your rules and then something else happens. If the site clearly says "Admin S"gets to do whatever they want", then that's that. But if it says "Admin S has to follow the rules like everyone else" then when Admin S does whatever they want and everyone lets Admin S and supports Admin S doing what they want, then complaints happen.

I think that you are right.

The majority of internet communities are run in a "what we say goes" way, whereby the only way to complain about someone is to take it to an admin (often called wizards or something similar) and the only way to complain about an admin is to take it to someone higher, and your ultimate authority is the owner (or in some cases simply the manager), unless they are breaking some law. And that's it. And if you don't like it, then you go elsewhere. Ultimately, if you have a problem with an admin then you may as well quit, unless its resolved immediately, and whilst having a problem with an ordinary level user is less of an issue, if it is supported by admins, or admins refuse to deal with it, then you may as well leave then too.

Some places try to have some kind of justice, they have rules and such. Ultimately, the rules don't mean a thing and they can do what they like anyway. Some places just have 1 or 2 rules so that it makes it clear that they are more guidelines than rules and the authority system is the main part. But some places have dozens and dozens of rules, so that people get a misguided notion of fairness. And then ultimately of course that doesn't mean a thing.

And then of course are the ones that have a deep system of rules and regulations, that make people feel really like they have real rights. They have a pseudo-legal system. If you are banned, they give a detailed reason for it. They make out that it is all really serious and so forth.

LiveJournal was one place that had a deep system of rules, and so is Wikipedia. There was a talker called Crystal Palace that did as well, and there are many others.

But when you have that really deep system of rules, we forget one thing - ultimately they can do pretty much whatever they like, especially with regards to who to ban. So long as they aren't banning because of your race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, any disability, or anything that might count as discrimination, they can ban whoever they like. And ultimately, when you have places that do have these deep systems, the deeper that they get, the worst it gets. Because ultimately they don't actually have to have real reasons for banning someone - they can just do it to anyone. And hence when you are banned it can amount to a smear campaign.

And the thing is that if you're banned from Crystal Palace then anyone who visits the talker can look there and look up your profile and it says bad things - about a username that nobody knows. Big deal. If you're banned from LiveJournal it says "journal suspended" and on top of that your journal is deleted. Yes, they have a case on you, but it is hidden from public view. And whilst Encyclopedia Dramatica and such can run a smear campaign against you, its at least not done by LiveJournal themselves. But what makes Wikipedia much, much worse than the others is that on top of the false idea that they have real rules with actual meaning, they leave that smear, in the form of an Arbitration case or at least on your user page and talk page - forever. I mean why can't they just delete your user page and user talk page? Why can't they delete your ACCOUNT? Why can't they delete the Arb Com page once its finished and you end up banned? I mean why not?

There is no earthly reason why Wikipedia can't do this. They could easily change their software to allow this. But they don't. So they instead not only have unfairness (hell, life isn't fair) but they have a system that positively encourages smear campaigns, not through some external site, but on Wikipedia itself. That is the problem, much more than simply being banned.

Good stuff. Tell him to put that in.

This ignore how utterly dysfunctional the "community" itself is, how broken it's process are and how hopeless "consensus" has become. The "community" forced Brandt into multiple BLP processes, each becoming successively more vindictive than the last until the sheer weight of the rancor finally allowed removal of his article without meaningful reform. The "community' has overwhelmingly supported suppression of links to critical sites. The "community" supports any whim of it's God King on the rare occasions he even shows his head anymore.

There are thousands of honest editors of WP but they are not participants in your community. Many are coming to the realization that a successor project is needed, sans the "community."