Wikipedia:Governance reform

Please edit this proposal!

Failure of the traditional governance model

Wikipedia's traditional governance model has failed to scale adequately with the project's growth, and has become incapable of operating effectively in a project orders of magnitude larger than it was at the time the model was adopted.

Internally-motivated policy formation has effectively stagnated. The last major changes to the main body of policy--the BLP policy and the non-free content policy--were both essentially imposed from the outside, due to external pressure on the project. Major internally-driven policy proposals, such as the attribution policy, have failed to result in anything but the predictable "no consensus" outcome.

This is, in some sense, inevitable in a project with a perpetually open set of individuals available to participate. Policy debate becomes, in most cases, nothing more than an endurance contest between those who wish to effect some change and those who wish to retain the status quo; and, so long as those opposed to any proposal are sufficiently dedicated and sufficiently vocal, they can keep the debate going without any effective means being available to force a decision. The few attempts to do so by means of a general referendum have proven ineffective.

Policy formation thus devolves to two essentially degenerate processes:

Policy changes by edit-war

Small-scale changes to existing policy are typically made by one or several editors that either quietly make changes to the policy, or more actively edit-war to force certain changes over the objections of other editors. Here, as in more general debates, sheer obstinacy will often overcome opposition, as objecting editors simply burn out from the effort of opposing a dedicated group bent on forcing through some change.

Policy changes by the Arbitration Committee

The Committee continues to retain an ability to change policy through the rulings it adopts in its decisions--although, as the Committee is not actually authorized to change policy, these changes are typically presented as "interpretations" or "clarifications" to what is presumably already agreed upon. The Committee is not, however, well-suited to play the role of policy-maker, as its approach is unduly colored by the specifics of disputes before it, leading to sporadic and often contradictory attempts at changing policy.

Neither of these are a particularly well-constructed means of governing a project of this scale.

The lack of an effective, community-oriented policy-making process has caused a variety of other unfortunate consequences, as there is no feasible way to change outdated and unscalable processes. Among others:

• The dispute resolution process has largely collapsed into a single arbitration step, as the various preliminary and community-driven methods are either no longer effective or have been abandoned.
• Policy pages are often dominated by small groups of editors that actively resist any change away from their favored position.
• Attempts to develop new policy sometimes degenerate into outright conflict among groups of editors; consider, for example, the various proposals regarding attack sites.

Adopting a new model

The obvious solution to the lack of an effective policy-making process would be to adopt the methods used by other groups of a comparable size in the "real world". The most obvious of these--and perhaps the one most suited to easy adoption within the constraints of Wikipedia--is the elected decision-making group.

One option would be to push policy-making responsibilities onto an existing such group. The Arbitration Committee is perhaps the closest thing Wikipedia has to a "governing body", and could potentially be used in such a fashion. ArbCom is not, however, well-suited to exercising both a judicial role and a legislative one; and it is, in many ways, simply too small and too overworked to function effectively in the latter.

An alternative would be to convene a dedicated policy-making body (the "Wikipedia Assembly", perhaps?):

• The body would contain a sufficient number of editors to serve as both a reasonable cross-section of editors and as an effective deliberative forum. At a minimum, around 50 editors might be sufficient, although a larger body would allow better scalability from the outset.
• The body would be freely elected, ideally via a tranche system that would allow overlap between successive terms.
• The body would be given essentially unlimited authority to set project policy, so long as it is in compliance with Wikimedia Foundation policies and resolutions, the relevant laws, and so forth.
• The body would make decisions by vote (either majority or super-majority, as appropriate).

This would, admittedly, be a significant departure from the traditional "Wikipedia is not a democracy" philosophy. The alternative to democratization, however, is policy stagnation of the sort that has been the norm for the past few years; and that is increasingly untenable as the project continues to grow and grapple with ever more sophisticated concerns.