User talk:Qq/What kind of system is this?

I have to admit, this is a pretty good analysis of Wikipedia's working methods.--Father Goose (talk) 05:41, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Culture and law

It is logical that, even after all these years we've been gathered here, policy remains in such a nebulous state, if only because the fact that anyone can edit it puts it in a constant state of flux. In that type of circumstance, we have to have some flexibility as to whether we apply it. But if that's the case, perhaps we shouldn't be so fast to whack people over the head with policy.

This is a cultural problem. People see "rules", and they automatically see them as potential tools for getting things done: if your opposition "breaks a rule", you can somehow use that against them. It is not necessary to see an "opposition" nor "rules" when one looks at Wikipedia. We have had, and to some extent still have, a cultural norm against thinking in terms of combat or in terms of rule-enforcement. However, as the community size has grown exponentially, the rate of enculturation has lagged. Many people fall very naturally into "wikilawyer" mode, as the existence of a rule-structure suggests that as a way to get things done "within the rules".

The trouble is, we haven't actually got a rule-structure. We've got a more-or-less fluid collection of traditions, rules-of-thumb, arbitrary conventions, and constant innovation. Unfortunately, our policy and guideline pages look just like rules, for the most part. This problem of presentation impedes the enculturation that should guide new editors to understand the role of "rules" here.

I suspect this state of affairs could be improved by rewriting policy and guideline pages to make them less law-like. They should be more descriptive and less prescriptive. They should be more explicit about their own fluidity. We should make it clear that policies are not weapons, and that accusing someone of a WP:CIV violation, for example, is actually a pretty terrible way to react to incivility. I absolutely agree that we shouldn't be so fast to whack people over the head, because head-whacks make for pretty poor conflict resolution, it turns out. -GTBacchus^(talk) 21:26, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

As organizations become larger, the need to establish and stick to rules generally becomes greater. It's kinda like how when you're playing baseball with a few kids in the backyard, you can be more casual and lenient about the rules (for one thing, you don't have any formal umpires or anything, so you don't have any basis for enforcing them). But when you're start getting more serious, drawing lines on the field, putting up bleachers, having people pay to get in (users are paying Wikipedia a lot of labor in order to be a part of this project), etc. then you pretty much have to get stricter about the rules. And that's actually a good and helpful thing.

Now, there are still going to be a few blown calls, but it's a heck of a lot better than letting the umpires judge on whatever criteria they think best, and then having them stand around arguing for extended periods because there isn't a clear set of rules. Nobody wants that. It's better to clearly state from the beginning what the rules are, so that the players can know what's going on from the get-go, and nobody can claim it's an ex post facto situation.

Of course, there has to be some method of promulgating rules. Henry M. Robert wrote, "the evolution of majority vote in tandem with lucid and clarifying debate–resulting in a decision representing the view of the deliberate majority–far more clearly ferrets out and demonstrates the will of the assembly." Majority vote is probably a better system than what we have here for enacting policy, but it's still not perfect. Fortunately, I think subversion branching can be the key to making everyone happy, but I'll talk about that later. Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 21:48, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

I see that you're describing one model, which is backed up by theory. I'm not sure the evidence is in that a different one might not work better with this medium. After all, Henry M. Robert's analysis significantly predates the Internet. Is majority voting the end of evolution for our decision-making structures, or might we be evolving something more suited to the new space in which we're working? Wikipedia is different in important ways from a parliamentary assembly, and different in even more ways from a baseball game. Is it clear that what you're trying to fix is, in fact, broken? -GTBacchus^(talk) 21:56, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

I think that while our current system works well in most cases, it does not work well in certain situations, and that those situations cause a significant amount of trouble (it's the Pareto principle). What's less clear is how, or whether, principles of parliamentary procedure can be applied effectively to our situation. Some of them we already use (WP:PARL). Others, we have not been so willing to try to adapt because the community has been generally suspicious of enacting new firm rules. Whatever governance system is tried, there are always tradeoffs, so I can understand the reluctance to want to make such shifts.

I'm beginning to think our best solutions will be technological in nature. And this is not a bad thing, of course. Wikipedia itself might be regarded as a partial technological solution to notability debates about what to put in paper encyclopedias. It opened the door to create a much larger and more inclusive encyclopedia. Now we run into the question, what are the limits of what we're willing to include in this paperless encyclopedia? Many factors go into that decision, such as a desire to be professional-looking, verifiable, etc. Of course, those who want to include more in this encyclopedia than the community allows are told to post their content elsewhere. Some people don't take it well and get quite upset, because they want the advantages of being able to cross-link to/from Wikipedia and get the economies of scale that come from having wiki-wide bot activity, templates, discussion, etc. Should we cross-link with every wiki under the sun? What about allegedly "spammy" interwiki links? There are a lot of issues to address to make forking work well, and I haven't even gone into most of them here.

I think a superstructure can be built over/around the whole thing (perhaps many superstructures) that allow for integration of all this information without necessarily having to change Wikipedia policy. It might use subversion branching, or it might not. I'm talking about web development here, of something outside the Wikimedia aegis. It'll take some creativity to figure out the best methods for doing it, but I think there are probably enough tech-savvy people disenchanted with Wikipedia to work on it. And if they won't do it for free, that might not be a problem because there's probably money to be made in this idea.

This probably sounds a bit cryptic, but I didn't feel like going into a detailed explanation here. More is available at User_talk:Abd#What_about_this_idea.3F. Of course, it could also turn out that my specific technological ideas aren't the best, and someone else will come up with something better. Point is, I'm not convinced that tweaks to Wikipedia alone will solve all our problems. Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 22:15, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Would you mind providing an example of a situation that is handled particularly poorly by our current system (such as it is)? -GTBacchus^(talk) 22:34, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, let's try Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/GNAA. As amusing as that saga was, and as much of a classic in the annals of Wikipedia history it became, how many countless hours and repetitive arguments went into those successive debates? Could a more precise notability policy have settled the issue objectively? Perhaps. Can we be confident that the final result on the 18th vote was, in fact, representative of the Wikipedia community? Wikitruth's article Quintuple Jeopardy asks, "How can anyone claim that what's going on here isn't just a case of rallying the right troops at the right time to ram through your given agenda?"

In a deliberative assembly, it might have been handled by debating for awhile, and then closing debate and deciding by majority vote, and being done with it. If the assembly had voted against the motion to delete, then a motion could not have been made again until another session (unless new information or circumstances shed a different light on the subject), except by a motion to reconsider made within certain time limitations. If the assembly had voted to delete, then rescinding the decision would have required either previous notice, or a two-thirds vote, or a majority of the entire membership; or again, a motion to reconsider made within certain time limits. (These are designed to prevent a temporary majority from taking advantage of the situation.) Here, our equivalent of those safeguards is that the admins will say, "All right, we're going to salt this thing so that no one re-creates it, and we don't have to deal with this deletion debate again!"

That parliamentary procedure approach would probably work tolerably well here, if it weren't for the sockpuppet problem, the fact that in any given debate, we have a miniscule percentage of the editors present, and the other inherent differences between online communities and deliberative assemblies. Plus there is a large workload of deletion debates. In real life, a common solution is to have the membership as a whole elect a smaller body to manage deletion, which can appoint subcommittees to handle groups of cases, in order to distribute the workload. Of course, then you run into all the problems commonly associated with representative government.

So, my thought is that in a situation like GNAA, it's best to transwiki it to a more inclusive (or perhaps specialized) project that doesn't mind having that content. And find a way to have interwiki links to/from it, if desired. And here is where it's a bit similar to international relations. You can have the different wikis make reciprocal arrangements to have interwiki links; or connections just happen through actions of their members; or they can be imposed from above, as under some kind of supranational system like the European Union. And I'm thinking the latter is probably going to be what happens here. We already have sites like Answers.com that aggregate information from Wikipedia and other encyclopedias. We just need more sophisticated ways of doing it. And in the end, I think it's going to be the most mutually agreeable outcome. Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 23:07, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Your criticism there should not be of the "notability" criteria, but of the AfD process. A process that has to be run through 15 18 times to produce a result no more definitive (yet more binding) than the prior 14 times is where the fault lies.--Father Goose (talk) 23:41, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

How can it be improved so it's not like that? Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 23:45, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

There were various issues at work in the GNAA case, a large one being that many editors who wanted the page deleted chose to advance invalid "I don't like this organization, so delete the page"-style arguments. Such arguments tend to muddy the waters, and our notability guidelines were in a much more inchoate state then. It took a lot of iterations, for some reason, for us to learn how to delete such pages (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Encyclopedia Dramatica is another case). It turns out, the effective way to do it is to avoid all talk of moral outrage, and to stick to very boring arguments about notability. The notability guidelines have improved since then.

I'm not convinced that the GNAA article taking so long to delete was a bad thing. We were learning. Taking 15 tries to figure out how to do something seems normal to me. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:46, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

(un-indent) So do you see things as being pretty much fine the way they are? Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 23:48, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

I see that as a possibility. I'm not convinced that the current system is broken or inadequate, but I'm very open to hearing arguments on that matter. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:51, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually, no, I"m not completely happy with the current setup, because it's a bit too law-like now. I think we should do more to keep things loose. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:52, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Interesting! Well, Wikipedia:Use common sense and such could be adequate, if everyone could agree on what common sense is. There are also some fundamental differences on what this encyclopedia should be (e.g. what crosses the line into becoming an indiscriminate collection of information)? When there aren't hard-and-fast rules on what's allowable, and the situation is contentious, sometimes it ends up being the ones holding the tools who decide, because ordinary users can't revert them. For instance, I highly doubt we'll see GNAA recreated, now that it's protected. An admin is not going to wheel war, and someone would have to sustain a pretty serious campaign to try to get that overturned. I've been around long enough to know it's not going to happen.

Is that a bad thing? Well, I'll tell you this much, it's certainly more rigid than what one might see in a deliberative assembly, where one could simply give previous notice and then repeal the earlier decision with a majority vote (or the other alternatives mentioned earlier). It's going to take a lot more than a majority vote to bring back GNAA. So, the idea that lack of rules makes things less rigid may not be true. An administrator is generally not going to want to do something that could get him in trouble, and acting on anything less than a substantial supermajority can get him in trouble, because there's no rule clearly authorizing the action. And when you require big supermajorities, you tend to thwart the will of the majority and end up with decisions being made by pseudoconsensus. Theoretically, that results in less people being happy than under majority rule. This reminds me, there's another Henry M. Robert quote I want to add to this piece: "Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty." Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 00:06, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

If GNAA is the subject of non-trivial coverage in multiple independent sources, then the article will be created. Until then, or until the notability guidelines change to a standard that allows for GNAA, it won't. That seems to be an example of our processes reaching the correct decision. -GTBacchus^(talk) 00:19, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I'll let you know if I think of a better example. In the meantime, though, isn't it true that certain firm and specific rules are good? Like WP:CSD criteria, for instance. We wouldn't want admins to delete stuff willy-nilly. Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 00:23, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I have no problem with WP:CSD. We agreed that certain deletions really don't require any discussion, and can be unambiguously identified by an admin. Things are deleted outside the scope of the CSD though, despite people's attempts to make them exhaustive. People don't delete stuff willy-nilly - they would be stopped - but people aren't 100% bound by CSD either. It's somewhere in between. -GTBacchus^(talk) 00:30, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Most of the cases I've seen where someone deviated from CSD criteria, the results weren't good. For instance, the first draft of legality of the Vietnam War was speedily deleted on the basis of A1, when it's obvious from the title what it's about. And sometimes A7 is used on articles on subjects other than persons, organizations, or web content. For instance, I've seen it applied to concepts or theories that didn't have an assertion of importance. Not good; CSD was not intended to take the place of AfDs in deciding such notability questions. I'll have to start cataloging some more specific examples as I see them. Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 00:37, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

When it's done well, you don't see it. I work in page moves, and I delete so many pages, and I have no idea what the CSD are. I'm sure most of them fall under housekeeping, but what I do, and what I hope most admins do, is exercise common sense.

Regarding your example, does the fact that the CSD were not meant to take the place of AfDs in those cases really imply that the speedy deletions are bad? Why? Reading CSD it really does say that there shouldn't be any exceptions, but then we have another page called Ignore all rules. If someone ignores the CSD for some compelling reason, can we say that's necessarily bad, without knowing the circumstances? -GTBacchus^(talk) 00:47, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

The effects of IAR tend to be only as good as the judgment being exercised by the person wielding it. I favor erring on not deleting, if there's a question of whether it's appropriate. People can get very emotional about their articles getting deleted, especially without a fair hearing, or when someone is ignoring the rules to do it. I know it has annoyed me every time I went to a forum or something (outside wikipedia) and my comments got deleted (e.g. because the topic was closed or something). They could at least have emailed it to me so I might post it somewhere else. Yeah, admins will do that for you here, but most newbies won't realize that; I didn't know about it till I'd been here for more than a year. It should be part of the template that people get on their talk page when their article has been speedied. It's kind of like getting your Miranda rights read to you; some people might already know them, but it's good in case someone doesn't. I think I'll make a bold edit to that template. Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 01:02, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

That's true about judgment. I think that a case where someone is going to get emotional is a poor choice of a case to "ignore all rules". I think we try to select admins whose judgment we trust, and then remove the ones whose judgment doesn't pan out. -GTBacchus^(talk) 01:07, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Deletions, undeletions, and an unsolicited lecture

Regarding the undeletion/recreation of GNAA, like GTBacchus said, it would be recreated if it could be done solidly within policy. Encyclopedia Dramatica, in fact, just underwent a deletion review (Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2008 March 6) that almost saw it recreated. One thing I've gleaned is that once really divisive articles (or project pages, templates, etc.) are deleted, keeping them deleted is favored just to keep such a huge amount of controversy distracting us from more important work. I dislike the coercive aspect of such deletions, but in all, I have to agree that one way to avoid 18 more deletion debates is to keep it deleted until something changes that allows it to become an unambiguous "keep" -- at which point it can be recreated. (Do note, on that same DR page, a "salted" article was permitted recreation due to the submission of an improved article.)

Regarding how to fix the AfD system, I've got some ideas, which I've cooking up very slowly. I saw you (Obuibo) comment on Kim Bruning's page a few days ago that you like to agitate and rage instead of ponder and maneuver. If you can't figure out how to master the second option, you'll expend a lot of energy but accomplish very little (and in the long run, you might get banned, since we're not here to fight. Discuss, sure, fight, no.)

When I first came to Wikipedia, I too thought I had all the answers on how to fix it, but I was missing one key factor. It's not enough to have notions, even right ones, about how to fix the system; you also know how to how to actually bring about those changes in the system. That requires a very complicated set of skills which I'm still developing. You have to learn what people will say "yes" to and what they'll say "no" to, and figure out how to herd all those cats together to say "yes". Even if you know how to design a perfect system, if you can't get the denizens of Wikipedia to say "yes" to it, it's useless.

Wikipedians do what they want. This is the primal rule of Wikipedia, and it's reflected by IAR. There's no boss, just a bunch of ants. There are a few soldier ants, maybe, and a smaller number of individuals who are responsible for the anthill itself, but their impact on the encyclopedia is still extremely small. tortured metaphor, laugh If Wikipedia ever does develop a formal, rigid power structure, then the ants will no longer be free to do what they want, and will just leave. The ants have no incentive to contribute to Wikipedia aside from their own interests and initiative. They owe Wikipedia nothing. They owe its "masters" nothing. They owe its rules nothing.

Any changes to Wikipedia's working methods you can come up with must take that into account, first and foremost. I'm not familiar enough with parliamentary systems to know how compatible they are with that simple reality. But I can say this: what works for certain governmental bodies is very far from certain to work on Wikipedia. Just about all changes must come from the bottom, not the top. If it comes from the top and no one likes it, they'll ignore it or just leave. So if you want to "fix Wikipedia", learn what the rank and file want, or figure out how to make them want what you want. Otherwise you'll just be another man with laryngitis on Speakers' Corner. That is, ultimately, self-indulgent.

If you really want change, learn how to get us to want the same things you want. Instead, I've seen you do a lot of complaining about how we've rejected one or another thing you've proposed. Our collective response to that kind of thing is, "Yeah? So? Who are you?" We say that to everyone. Don't take it personally. Understand what it means.--Father Goose (talk) 04:41, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

It's not so much that I resent the community not accepting my ideas – it's that they won't let an utterly benign experiment proceed on a test basis, WP:PRX being the best example of that. Template:Prob and Template:Canvassing are probably more in the grey area, because theoretically some disruption might come out of those, depending on what you consider to be disruption. Ultimately, we found a better alternative to Template:Canvassing (see, for instance, User:Kmweber/Some AfDs to fight and User:Obuibo Mbstpo/Discussions in progress and their transclusion on my userpage), so Template:Canvassing's rejection didn't matter. Most of my ideas begin as an unworkable starting point and have to be improved in order to become workable. But I'm an eventualist.

One thing I do agree with Abd on is that some of the most effective changes are those that don't require community consent to implement. It takes some creativity to come up with those, but it's pretty exciting when it happens. Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 04:55, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

It was our view that PRX wasn't benign. Actually, I didn't participate in the "rejection" of PRX, but the way you presented it, it seemed to wholly undermine the principle of "polling is not a substitute for discussion". So unless you overturn the support for that principle, PRX will forever be a non-starter. Doesn't matter if it's benign or not, because it runs contradictory to how we prefer to approach problems here.

Now, AfD runs contrary to that principle too, all too often. I don't think the way to fix it is to intensify the "voting" aspect. I happen to think that would have the exact opposite of the desired effect. The more political, legalistic, and "votey" Wikipedia gets, the more horrid it gets. This is why people are so against canvassing as well; it promotes the concentration of power during decision-making processes. The ugly reality is that there are several canvassing mechanisms off-wiki (IRC, mailing lists, etc.), but discouraging them in general seems to cut down on the political aspects of Wikipedia and keep things in more of a "reasoned argument" mode.

From the various things you've advocated, it would seem that you have more faith in majority-based decision-making mechanisms than in Wikipedia's various hybrid mechanisms. AfD is the most majority-based process we have, and I think that alone is a huge reason why it's so faulty. It's become a platform for decisions based on prejudicial thinking instead of on the basis of principles. The number of people voting "keep" or "delete" should be discarded in favor of how compelling the arguments are. This is how AfD is meant to function in theory, but admins are given little guidance on how to interpret the arguments, so they either go rouge or honor the "!vote".

As for effective changes, you're right that the most effective ones are the ones that don't need community approval. Most of what actually gets done on Wikipedia is boldness that gains approval ex post facto.--Father Goose (talk) 06:29, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

The standard wikilibertarian approach is to exclude as many matters from community decision as possible, so that they're not being decided by majority, consensus, or any other voting basis. For instance, most MfDs are theoretically unnecessary. It's kinda like how our society has laws against cannabis. Is abstaining from cannabis use really an issue that we need to decide by majority vote? It shouldn't even be an issue that comes before the legislature, since it's a personal choice for each individual to decide based on their own priorities. For some people, e.g. people who will die without it, it might be a good idea; for others, it might not be. Similarly, what you have in your userspace should generally be a personal choice. The idea is that if everyone agrees to live and let live, rather than forcing their view on someone else, then it will produce maximum happiness.

Majority vote is often the best voting basis to use when the situation demands that the community decide a question as a whole. But, it's better just not to submit decisions to the community when it can be avoided. As P.J. O'Rourke pointed out, if we decided everything by majority vote, every meal would be pizza, and since the majority of the population is female, we would all be married to Mel Brooks.

Deletion in general is a bad idea, and therefore AfD, no matter what voting basis is used, will be problematic. The solution is to switch to pure wiki deletion and make decisions using the WP:BRD cycle, which works so well. It will be much more harmonious, and I think lends itself to more productive discussions. Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 07:06, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Okay, is there a motion on the floor?

I'm new on Wikipedia. My account goes back to 2005, and I'd been anticipating something like Wikipedia since the 1980s, or even earlier, and working on what structure might look like, but didn't actually get involved seriously here until September, 2007. So, on the one hand, I make lots of noobie mistakes, I really am new, comparatively; on the other hand, the whole structure, how it works, the policies, etc., make sense to me, because I'd been working on it, in isolation or within other organizations, for thirty years.

Obuibo Mbstpo, from what I've been able to gather and from what he has stated to me, began editing in 2004. I've only seen accounts going back to 2005, but that account was clearly started by someone already very familiar with Wikipedia. To bring us up to date, the account started in 2005 continued usage until late 2007, then was replaced by Sarsaparilla, and it is beyond me why Mbstpo shut down that account and created a new one, it made for a lot of unnecessary wikifuss. On the other hand, he tends to do things that are permitted and which piss off a lot of people who think that they aren't permitted. To a degree this is useful. To a degree, it's disruptive. Societies must determine which Rule 0 violations can be permitted, and woe to the society which errs in where to draw the line. Too loose, and the society descends into chaos, because, for well-known reasons, trolls will seek out and test every ambiguity in the rules. Too tight, and the society becomes rigid and unable to change, for the tightest and most persistent rules are the unwritten ones. Societies which strictly punish Rule 0 violations, rather than merely containing them, die when the conditions under which they were founded shift, for they cannot respond efficiently, they condemn their change artists to drink hemlock.

Mbstpo is a change artist, one of the best I've ever met. I'm a theoretician, at this point. I've been like him in the past, people used to get totally pissed at me for doing what I had a right to do, because it wasn't what the majority wanted. Still happens, sometimes, but I'm certainly not as directly confrontive as I was. However, in many cases, I've had the opportunity to meet these people years later. What have they told me? "You were right. I couldn't see it at the time, but you were right. It had to be done." Very often, I don't approve, at first, of what Mbstpo does. But if I assume good faith and take it straight, and investigate, damn if he isn't very often right. I.e., he is showing us something that needs attention. AfD is broken. He's demonstrating that, currently, to outraged cries from others who can't see it, who like things just the way they are. But he's doing nothing that is outside policy, except for one guideline: WP:POINT, which is one of the guidelines that depend on an assessment of Rule 0 violation. To judge that someone has violated WP:POINT, one must abandon WP:AGF and assume that any disruption that results was intentional, and that it is not necessary. It's disruptive to identify a sock puppet, particularly a popular one. It causes a huge fuss. Is it a violation of WP:POINT, therefore? Mbstpo describes himself as a "radical inclusionist." He is simply !voting as one, openly and obviously. Others do the same (as inclusionists or deletionists) and conceal it. If what he is doing is contrary to policy, the policy must be made explicit, it's deceptive to leave it as "Well, he should have known it would cause us to become disruptive." Okay, they wouldn't say it quite that way, they would say, "He knew it would cause disruption," leaving out the actual mechanism of disruption, i.e., their response to a legitimate action.

And, of course, if we do examine the question of his behavior, we will have to address, to query the community, the basic issues of notability and what it means. It is our failure to do this in a thorough manner, actually seeking and finding consensus, that results in the continued waste of energy and damage to the project that continues to afflict us in the deletion wars. GNAA, in a functional society, would have been decided with minimal fuss, that it was so contentious, then, was an early sign that the foundations of policy had not been sufficiently examined. The debate, in fact, would not have been over GNAA, for that would have merely been an application of a policy, but it would have been where it should have been all along: what are the standards for inclusion of an article? Debating it in the context of a single instance is analogous to the development of common law, which arose through precedent. However, common law changes glacially and quite inefficiently, and never developed to the point that applicable precedent could be set through many cases over an issue like notability. Instead, deliberative democracies have decided such matters by creating statutory law, common rules and guidelines, so that people can expect that they can do this and not that, and so that energy isn't wasted building a castle that will promptly be torn down because it did not meet code.

Now, Wikipedia did certain things spectacularly well, and when something like the above is pointed out, many readers immediately draw conclusions, and they don't like the conclusions, and they assume that one who points this out is proposing the conclusions that they draw. It's a serious error. What I just described above is history, human history. It's not a conclusion (except in being a judgement about history). In particular, it is not a recommendation at all.

And thus it was with WP:PRX. We see here, repeated, some assumptions that were made by those who struggled with such determination to not merely Reject this proposal, but to delete and salt it. There were two basic proponents for WP:PRX: Mbstpo and myself. He wrote the original proposal, and it mentioned applications which looked like voting. However, I rapidly clarified this, and Mbstpo confirmed the clarification: WP:PRX was not about voting, and the "proxies" named would have no right to vote on behalf of any user. It was explicit that WP:PRX did not change any policy at all, contrary to what was often asserted about it. It really shouldn't have been made as a proposal at all, except that Mbstpo wanted to get participation in designing the file formats, and he also desired publicizing some of the possible implications. The proposal was, in the end, only to establish some file formats and allow users to create such files. I was very explicit: if the proposal had been that we start making decisions by vote, I'd be opposed. Indeed, I'm opposed to the current practice of allowing what certainly look like votes to me. If votes don't count, why do we allow them to clutter up debate pages? Hence I have made proposals that we start to clean up processes like this.

In deliberative societies, voting isn't done until the community has decided on the question! A deliberative body never debates a motion until it has not only been made, but has been seconded, it is out of order and well known to be a huge time-waster. To even come to a vote in a deliberative body under Robert's Rules requires a two-thirds majority, or the absence of dissent. Commonly overlooked: the goal of traditional deliberative process is consensus, not majority rule. Majority rule is a necessary compromise to allow decisions to be made, and healthy communities like Wikipedia, depending on "group unity" to function well, make decisions by majority rule only in emergencies. In the end, the alternative to majority rule is not consensus, it is minority rule. (And this is obvious when the status quo favors a significant minority, they can, in consensus organizations, block changes, and do, which is why consensus organizations, that make consensus a rigid rule, tend to not last more than a limited time.)

So with AfD, for example, no voting should be allowed at all at the beginning. The page should have a "secretary," accepted by consensus (or, bottom line, a representative majority, to be avoided unless unavoidable), who edits the page to, first, become a compendium of evidence. This step is not taken until the nomination is seconded, and seconding a nomination would be taking responsibility for personally verifying what is claimed, just as nominators should be considered responsible for accuracy in nomination. Frivolous nomination should result in loss of the right to nominate.

Then, once seconded, evidence would be gathered. Any user could add evidence to the page. But no arguments. Just evidence. The page is functioning as a fact-finding committee. When it is considered that evidence gathering is complete (the secretary would ask if there is any more and would wait a decent period), then comes the argument phase.

The evidence phase is strictly NPOV, as if it were an article on the topic of the article. Everything stated in the evidence section would, in fact, be accepted by consensus, if it is properly done. We actually know how to do this, this is routine practice on Wikipedia, and experienced editors should have no trouble at all with it.

The argument phase is attributed. As with an ArbComm case, users may sign off on arguments, i.e., indicating specific acceptance of that argument. Multiple statements of the same argument would be combined by the secretary. To close the argument phase should properly take a supermajority, and, unless significant time has passed, efforts should be made to accommodate even a single dissenter. But not beyond reason.

Once we have the evidence and arguments, it would be *optional* to have a voting phase. Votes, again, would simply be votes, a signature added to a vote section. No comments with votes, except in the edit summary, that's okay. (Comments may be made, to be sure, but would be removed by the secretary. Generally, when the secretary removes something from the debate page, it does into Talk unless intrinsically objectionable. And then who makes the decision? Probably the secretary, who has abstained from debate. The secretary will probably state the basis for the decision by reference to the arguments. Someone does not like the decision? Well, what is legitimate at that time depends on the nature of the decision, and, remember, I'm proposing no changes to policy. Thus a closer is allowed to disregard votes. If so, however, the closer will not state "consensus was." The closer will state the arguments and policies involved. And then the full range of review process is available, but, contrasted to currrent process, there is a coherent and clear record of what happened and why the decision was made.

Now, what would WP:PRX have done to this? Well, the proxy network, which is being implemented through alternate means, would have brought the discussion to the attention of editors with the tools and inclination to develop better evidence and arguments, at the same time as it reduces the overall community attention needed to the process. So, I'd expect, you would get better arguments. This happens even if relatively few editors participate! Sock puppets are irrelevant. You don't come up with better arguments, or do more work to develop evidence, by creating sock puppets! The opposite happens, in fact.

Then, in a voting phase, it becomes possible -- if there is significant participation in a proxy network -- to estimate broader consensus. As I stated, I would be opposed (at least in the near future) to using this to determine outcomes, I would leave outcome determination exactly as it is now, the decision of a responsible servant of the community. If one were to look at my outside theoretical work, one would find that generally I am not proposing that binding decision be made by proxy analysis, I'm proposing -- and have been proposing for years -- that actual power remain, always, with the individual members. The proxy network is a means for negotiating consensus, and for measuring it, but even community consensus does not bind individual members, who remain free except in certain narrow matters involving the welfare of the community as a whole. Again, I didn't invent all this, I found it. One simply needs to know where to look.

They attempted to crush WP:PRX, not realizing what it was, and not realizing that it is actually impossible to crush. Attempting to crush it is probably the fastest way to create it, to cause the community to awaken, because the foundation of WP:PRX is actually the foundation of Wikipedia itself: the voluntary cooperation of a community of editors.

And much more can be said, to be sure. Is there a motion on the floor? --Abd (talk) 22:32, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

You have not managed, to date, to make PRX sound appealing to the community ("Great idea! That will work!") If you can figure out how to do that, you can stop resenting us for not understanding your idea.

The most effective change artists on Wikipedia are seducers, not simply agitators.--Father Goose (talk) 03:38, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

I am puzzled. Have I ever expressed anything that would legitimately lead you to believe that I resent you or others for not understanding the idea?

I've been presenting this idea for quite a few years now, and the majority of people don't get it. Even face-to-face, it's quite difficult to communicate. However, a year later, I've found, it gets much easier. It will get even easier if people have an opportunity to see it working. Guess what? It's working, to a small degree, on Wikipedia. Somebody else invented it, but I realized the implications, and Mbstpo applied it. Basically, it's delegable proxy without the proxy files. It's late, so I'll leave the explanation of this reference to those who have been watching Mbstpo and I. Should I explain it? Why? Remember, it's a Rejected idea. Why should I explain it? It just irritates people. But it is working, quite well, thank you. I predict that it will change Wikipedia, much more rapidly than we might expect. Or not rapidly, slowly. I can't predict which. But change it will.--Abd (talk) 04:39, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

"They attempted to crush PRX" does sound resentful, yes. Still, if you're figuring out how to get constructive things done on Wikipedia without running into problems, then my hat's off to you.--Father Goose (talk) 07:58, 17 March 2008 (UTC)