Sorry, Eric, this response is entirely regarding mnemonic's post. Seems that part of it got deleted?

The most prominent excuse for my original topic ban on Cold fusion was a Range poll that I set up to attempt to find the best version to revert to after Hipocrite managed to wangle a protection of a radical change he'd made. That was quite a feat! Edit warrior goes to RfPP and gets protection because there is revert warring going on. He's the most prominent of the reverters. It got blamed on me, but I hadn't broken a sweat.

Range polls are good but not optimal for decision-making. They are ideal for advising decision-making. Lots of people, with Range polls, will bullet-vote, i.e., vote Approval style, often just voting full range for their favorite and zero for everything other than that. That's okay, as long as the poll itself is not the complete decision-making process. Wikis got stuck on this idea of "consensus," which means something other than what it means in the world of deliberative process. Wikipedians who know that world tend to get ejected quickly.... Long ago, it came to be understood that, broadly, "majority rule" is a highly practical guideline, but there are plenty of caveats. A defined electorate is one of them. If you have 8 million eligible voters, and, for some massive discussion, a few hundred show up, you really know very little. While you have "motivated voters," you don't know anything about the vast majority who have not participated. They might care a great deal, they might not care at all. Most of them don't even know that the question has been asked.

The standard response to this situation is representative democracy, but "the community" rejected even the most libertarian imaginable implementation, when a file structure that would allow ad-hoc representational analysis was proposed with WP:PRX. Even though that was just an experiment, even though it changed nothing about decision-making, even though it did not actually involve voting, it was rejected because "we don't vote," a conceit that is unbelievably obtuse. Of course there is voting on Wikipedia!

But there is practically no way to judge how representative it is.

And any implementation of sane structure around decision-making will alter the balance of power, or at least the oligarchy will perceive it that way, so they will intervene to prevent it. If allowed.

There are basically two ways around this: from the bottom and from the top. From the bottom is difficult, it would take an organized revolution, and most people really, when push comes to shove, don't care enough. Perhaps. Perhaps I've merely been an ineffective advocate.

The other solution would come from the top, from someone with authority who sees the value of having an intelligent, awake community as a "partner."

Problems like the image filter have a practically infinite number of possible solutions. To find something that is optimal will take a great deal of back-and-forth, unless some leader gets lucky and hits on it. The necessary discussions cannot take place on a large scale, it becomes way too inefficient. Open commentary, yes, but not in the middle of negotiations!

Moellerism?

It think Sue said – some time after it became clear that a category-based filter was off the agenda – that the work on selecting and implementing a new filter design would begin this month.

Wanna make book on how long it takes Teh Communiteh to reject the next design?

Isn't social panic a form of crowdsourcing? If not, why not? What about the social panics I remember from my younger days, such as CND, then 'Protest and Survive'. This was a panic that accompanied the introduction of long-range missiles containing warheads that could devastate whole cities.

Then there was a social panic that accompanied the introduction of 'Collaterised Debt Obligations', which were a sort of warhead that could (and did) devastate the debt markets. This social panic is still continuing with 'Occupy Wall Street', let me remind you. Ask Sue Gardner about that.

Aren't there really two sorts of panic. The sort that you think needless and trivial, and the sort you are concerned about?

[Lively but off-topic discussion of internet porn, children, and parents moved here.]


Bingo.

Back by popular demand... Why wiki is evil and should be banned from k-12 schools.

All those who want "Moellerism" to be the New Wikipedia-Crazy-Bullshit Coined Word for 2012, raise your hands!

"Sycopath" was better, I think.

Just about all of my communications with WMF is mediated by my successor, Geoff Brigham, or by Michelle Paulson. Jimmy is sometimes on cc lists when I share information about some issues, e.g., SOPA and PIPA.




And, by the way, "cheeky" is not my word. It's actually WR's.

. . . courtesy of none other than Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. Let's not begrudge him credit for this one, at least.

There is a train coming down the tracks and ya'll running towards it. This aint about pirating your mp3s.

I wonder if Mike Godwin were still at the WMF, would this portrayal of the Wikimedia "puzzle globe" be considered a trademark violation?

There ya go!


t

Mike, to what extent does the WMF WANT to have some degree of separation or "lack of control" over English Wikipedia or the other language Wikipedias?

I have long thought to myself that there is a legal basis — some degree of screening from liability — behind this structure.

Some at WR want WMF (sans the loathed-by-many Jimmy Wales) to act as a sort of white knight, riding in and striking down the evil-doers (rogue administrators, pornography hobbyists, BLP violators, etc.). I suspect that the WMF is perfectly happy to accept lack of such control because they WANT lack of control for legal reasons.

I speak, of course, to Foundation's prospective ability to make use of the Bart Simpson Defense ("I didn't do it!").

t

Certainly there are legal incentives to operate Wikipedia the way WMF does. It seems to me that those incentives have been discussed elsewhere in this forum. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides a strong framework for staying arm's-length away from from the addition or modification of content. But even before Section 230 was passed, the conflicting rulings of Cubby v. Compuserve and Stratton Oaklmont v. Prodigy strongly suggested that post-hoc editorial intervention by the forum operator could result in liability for the operator. Many of the things folks here criticize Wikipedia for are a function of the legal framework at the time Wikipedia was founded -- a legal framework that is more or less in place today.

I don't believe this. It's clear that the people at the top think it's no big deal if Wikipedia is filled with objectionable content, and in fact prefer it the way it is.

Other websites keep out the fisting pics and seem to get along fine.

No, I'm pretty sure that's a straight answer — it makes logical sense to me.

If WMF starts jumping in to "fix" this and that, then they risk becoming responsible for the other thing over there, and the mega-lawsuit attached to it. The only way to avoid "the other thing" is to dodge making content changes to "this, that, and the other thing" all together.

This is the reason every time there is a BLP lawsuit in the wind, "User" Jimmy Wales gets ants in his pants making sure the piece gets to AfD, where The Usual Suspects make sure the article gets offed. I saw this up close and personal with a piece on Barry Chamish, which I helped gut out and save with input from Chamish himself, rather than the preferred option of The Establishment Types to whack the sucker.

So they grit their teeth and try coming up with end-runs around the process of governance at the various language projects, like WMF "Resolutions" on the principle of least offense or technological tweaks like image filters. That stuff is safe to them without endangering their firewall against BLP lawsuits, etc.

t

Israeli users of Godwin's Law to get 6 months in the slammer and a $25,000 fine?

I guess they're probably running out of actual NAZIs to chase down overseas, and are trying to find a new job for the agency that used to hunt them (I forget the name of it). Careful, you could be extradited at any time!