QUOTE(Doc glasgow @ Sat 14th February 2009, 11:21am)
QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Sat 14th February 2009, 5:40pm)
Have to disagree with Doc on this one. Process is the solution at this point.
Firm, dedicated dictatorial leadership works when you're dealing with a few hundred, at most a few thousand people. When you get to the size of a small town, though, you have to accept the inefficiencies of deliberative bureaucracy as being overall less harmful than the alternatives.
Yes, and no.
If process is simply a mechanism to allow everyone to have a fair say, then it may tend to produce reasonably stable results at the higher levels. (It is fairly hard for any motivated clique to game an arbcom election. The results may be moronic, but they are systemic not arbitrary.)
However, when it comes down to control of the content of a BLP on a minor sportsman, no "process" will save you from the fact that the only 2 people who happen to care about the bio have personal cause to hate the subject and want to stick it to him, and an infinite amount of patience to do so. Indeed the more process you have, the easier it will be for those motivate people to game it, and to dive off by war of attrition the couple of editors who look in for a minute and think "hey that article sucks a bit".
The only way you can save yourself from that, is to empower someone so that in the 5 minutes before they stop caring they are able to waltz in and say "wow, that sucks, and you're both banned" and then now have to waste time explaining themselves before 12 abuse investigations, and watchlist the article forever.
The root problem with wikipedia is that it tries to produce goods results by treating all editors equally - and expecting everyone to wield power over an article by spending time arguing with all others. We need "content constables" who don't have to do that - because they system assumes that 5 minutes of their time and judgement will be worth more than 500 min of the average motivated user at least 90% of the time.
How you get a leadership like that is another story. Wales is probably as safe a pair of hands in content problems as anyone. But a) he does not upscale b) he can't usually be bothered c) on the occasions he's delegated his judgement has sucked.
What is needed is uber-editors and a process to appoint such people that will ensure anyone aspiring to be one in order to perpetuate their own biases, and hatchet-jobs, will be identified and booted.
Okay, here you're talking about not legislating, but the solving of individual neighbor-vs-neighbor disputes that wind up in civil or small claims court in our own society. And yes, you can't have one Arbcom for that, as it would be like having the Supreme Court rule on every traffic ticket.
Okay, so where are we going to get the people. In our own system we appoint judges (sometimes they are elected). They can't be anonymous. We also make use of juries (both grand juries and trial juries), which can be essentially-anonymous SO LONG AS CHOSEN at random from uninvolved people. Both these solutions (more judges, random jurors for specific cases) have been suggested for Wikipedia, and both rejected. I think they're both sitting at perennial proposals.
In theory, Wikipedia could have 100 arbitrators with power to make binding arbitrations in specific cases. In theory, that's what administraters were supposed to have been, but they ended up getting pulled in from anybody passing by, and involved people, and they've generally sucked. If both sides in any given dispute could agree beforehand to the judgement (binding arbitration, if you will) of some admin who is picked from a pool, and who has never heard of the case and which both parties agree to use before anything happens, much would improve. Another perennial.
I don't know what to do. If a system refuses to learn by what has already been tried and found to work reasonably well in real-life and the real meat-world, there's nothing to be done for them, except wish them pain.
And also make yourself feel better, by razzing them when they suffer, from the sidelines
Hey, stupids! When are you going to get tired of standing behind the manure-spreader?