User:Thorncrag/Workshop/Wikipedia governance reform

Special Taskforce On Project Governance Reform on Wikipedia (STOPGROW)
Status	Developing framework
Initiated	20 December 2011
Expected completion	Not yet known
Participants	Thorncrag Wer900

Wikipedia's growing bureaucracy and the community's continued belief in "!bureaucracy" (that it is not a bureaucracy) fundamentally threatens the mission of the project.

Goals

Subject to change

1. To not interfere with content-building
2. To avoid "stuffyness" and legalize ("lawyer-speak") whenever possible
3. To avoid formalizing practices that are already effective without formality
4. To introduce formality to some processes which are currently ineffective via informal means
5. To create a framework for sustainable, evolving project governance
6. To reduce opportunity for wikilawyering and diminish the impact of such behavior
7. To provide clear means, both formally and informally, for redress of grievances to new contributors who do not understand the community's processes
8. To, in addition to currently informal processes in place:
   1. create a formal process for review of content issues
   2. create a formal process for review of executive action (e.g. administrators)
9. To review the meaning of involvement
10. To, in the context of a sustainable governance model, review the viability of:
    1. IAR
    2. consensus
    3. !vote
    • Note: Not proposing abolishing, goal is to re-affirm and clarify their roles, propose changes and new methods
11. To weigh the merits of a policy review and recommendation body
12. To generally provide for additional checks and balances
13. To generally diversify the concentration of power and authority held by a small bloc
14. To review and define the role of Jimmy Wales and his role as a de facto chief executive

Milestones

• This proposal should have a minimum number of contributors to ensure a broad perspective (10?)
• When proposal factors are complete present to communicty; this cannot happen until the proposal is fully completed and entirely comprehensive, anything less is likely to be rejected outright (?)

Preface

Wikipedia as an encyclopedia couldn't be more straightforward: a source of free knowledge for all; Wikipedia as a community of human beings attempting to collaborate together effectively, is significantly less straightforward.

Over the years the Wikipedia community has developed a body of rules, policies, and guidelines (henceforth "rules") that governs behavior of Wikipedians. The scope, effectiveness, and clarity of these rules vary widely. As a rule of thumb, there is no overall picture that one Wikipedian can see as for the rules of the Wikipedia community.

We are here to construct a framework to argue for a complete overhaul of Wikipedia's governance. To begin, we will list the important premises affecting Wikipedia's governance as it currently stands.

Distinction between activities

To assist us in formulating a big picture, let us make a distinction between Wikipedia project activities into two broad categories:

1. Content building
2. Project administration

This is an important distinction to make in any attempt to analyze, assess, and propose changes to project governance, because they are sometimes separate, sometimes inseparable, somewhere in between, or even both concurrently. Fundamentally, content building is not what needs an overhaul, only project administration, except that sometimes they are connected. The goal of this proposal however, is to have little effect on content building, and not to interfere with contributors' ability to contribute content without impediment, as is currently the case. In fact, the hope is that through such an overhaul, various impediments to content building will be lifted. To illustrate this point, see figure 1.

Wikipedia has become a bureaucracy

Wikipedia has a government

Before addressing any matters of bureaucracy, it's important that serious participants in the Wikipedia process accept realities that are true, and not to pretend they do not exist simply because they don't want to believe them, perhaps because it opposes conventional wisdom, the ideals of the project, or any other reason. We must first accept that Wikipedia does in fact operate under some form of government. This is true just as in most institutions whether corporations or other organizations, with some having more formal rules for governance than others.

government

the political direction and control exercised over the actions of the members, citizens, or inhabitants of communities, societies, and states; direction of the affairs of a state, community, etc.; political administration: Government is necessary to the existence of civilized society.

Using this definition, key in on "control exercised over the actions of the members", in our case, Wikipedians. It is true without question, that we govern ourselves through "accepted practices", partially codified into policies and guidelines. Denying that Wikipedia has its own form of government, denies ourselves the ability to adequately assess and reform it. For us to truly assess Wikipedia's processes, we must first accept that they are fundamentally governmental processes.

Operating definition of bureaucracy

To fully discuss this issue, we need to accept an operating definition of bureaucracy:

bureaucracy

1. government by many bureaus, administrators, and petty officials.
2. the body of officials and administrators, especially of a government or government department.
3. excessive multiplication of, and concentration of power in, administrative bureaus or administrators.
4. administration characterized by excessive red tape and routine.

Why Wikipedia has become a bureaucracy

Key in on definition one and the use of the term "petty officials". The use of the term "petty" is not meant to be negative. If we compare Wikipedia to that of a civic government bureaucracy, such as the federal government of the United States, "petty" merely means the army of staff and officials who either are not empowered, do not feel empowered, or their power is diluted as a means to effect change or affect the outcome of interaction with the bureaucracy themselves. Sound familiar? Sounds like Wikipedia to me; only, the petty officials on Wikipedia is the army of editors who every day feel powerless to affect Wikipedia either its management or its content.

Addressing these points of definition; first, let us accept that in Wikipedia terms, we have bureaus in the vein of our various noticeboards, managing sub-projects (e.g., SPI, LTA, and others), and areas of responsibilities thereof. Each of these often having different participants, not always seen or overseen by the majority of the community or administrators, so as to make them somewhat or partially insulated. To further illustrate this point, the Wikipedia project page for Sockpuppet Investigations currently has 423 watchers; this, out of more than 14 million users, accounts for an extremely small percentage for what could be considered an extremely important role.

Second, we should explore the fact that many content contributors never step foot in a policy or guideline discussion, either by choice or due to being unaware. The effect of this is is that we may not gain valuable insight from valuable content contributors, and moreover, that discussions on policy and guidelines over time can be unduly influenced by those frequent participants or those who have the advantage of being more informed on Wikipedia practices. Max Weber makes note of his view of bureaucracy that, "bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge". We must earnestly explore the possibility that contributors who may be utterly unfamiliar with Wikipedia policies and guidelines, either fail to contribute to their change, or whose comments regarding them are simply ignored by those of whom with more experience, regard those comments with little weight due to the apparent inexperience of the commenter. This is the very definition of bureaucracy.

Third, while it can't rationally be argued that Wikipedia is inundated with red tape, whereas we have very few definitive rules and vie to proceed informally wherever possible, it could be argued that this polar opposite has the very same effect as an excess of red tape. Because there are so very few rules governing processes, each time one of these informal processes takes place it has the potential to generate its own miniature process and debate to dictate how the original process itself should be processed, making the original process longer, more tedious, and more complicated than it ever had to be. This can have the very real effect of deterring participants in the original process, such as adminship requestors, and scares away potentially helpful participants in that process. There are some who will argue that we are for the better ridding ourselves of participants or candidates who do not have a stomach for these kinds of procedings, but this is a flawed premise because the end effect is ultimately group-think and intellectual deficits becoming evermore detrimental. This in and of itself could be considered bureaucratic, because it makes what should be a simple and straightforward process bloated and complicated, and tends to do so in each and every instance.

This is also characteristic of an adhocracy: where little definition exists for how a process should proceed, or a dispute resolved, a process is invented in each instance to figure out a disposition of the issue. While this works in the majority of cases on Wikipedia, it can cataclysmically and dramatically fail and consequently be the direct cause of a whole variety of new disputes, which is completely contrary to the whole reasoning behind the policy in the first place.

Wikipedia's form of government is a deliberative democracy

While there are many who call a bureaucracy a form of government in and of itself, it is more important to think of it more as a characteristic of government. For our purposes, Wikipedia falls into the definition of a deliberative democracy:

Deliberative democracy... is a form of democracy in which deliberation is central to legitimate lawmaking. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere voting, is the primary source of a law's legitimacy.

Wikipedia's single avenue of judicial recourse is insufficient

- Not capable of hearing all valid requests - No checks and balances with other authoritative sources (except informally for JW) - Cumbersome - No appellate system that makes sense (appealing to the same authority is moot)

Content disputes differ from all other types of disputes

(content versus project management) Separate from a judicial review, need for a content review authority.

No vote is no longer viable / No vote is still viable

(in some instances/in all instances/consensus)

Broad and inconsistent interpretation

The adhocracy for dealing with disputes, along with the wide latitude of discretion granted to players is contributing to editor attrition.

Proposed remedies

Charter

The Wikipedia community should institute a charter. This charter will formally, plainly, and with clarity:

1. Establish the core principles of the community
2. Define the roles and responsibilities of executive functionaries (e.g., administrators)
3. Define the roles, responsibility, and scope of the judicial processes
4. Expand the judicial processes to include additional avenues for adjudication of issues
5. Define a fallback mechanism for when consensus prevents drastically needed change
6. Establish core privileges granted to all Wikipedians
7. Clearly define certain behavior where those privileges can be revoked
8. Institute clear checks and balances
9. Establish a clear path that any Wikipedian can choose for redress of their grievance
10. Provide for automatically prescribed action for certain areas, removing broad areas of discretion
11. Clearly define meanings of certain core principles which are too broadly open to discretion (e.g., involvement, consensus)

Further, the charter must:

1. NOT interfere or in any way diminish or remove any current informal DR processes
2. NOT in any way curtail the freedom of contributing content
3. NOT codify any current rule, guideline, or policy which ought to still be subject to consensus-driven change