[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia moderators and moral authority (was Re: Repost: clear guidelines and the power to enforce)

Sat Nov 9 18:57:37 UTC 2002

I want to say that I am slowly coming around to Ed's way of thinking.

My departure last winter left a vacuum of power.  No, scratch that--far
more people have more power now than I ever presumed to have or use, which
I find disturbing.  What it has left is a vacuum of moral authority:
essentially, hardly anyone, including me, has any anymore.  This is in
large part because some eedjits (I won't name names, but you know who you
are) will now very predictably challenge any correctly self-righteous
attempts to enforce the rules, and there is no one person who is generally
respected who can step in and say, "You really should stop this.
So-and-so, you don't understand the such-and-such rule.  That's how we do
things here.  If you don't like it, leave."

Now, to a certain extent, this was always a problem.  For many months
before she became a more general public spectacle, Julie and I and a few
others struggled with Helga.  There is *nothing* I could do to make Helga
understand, or respect, the NPOV policy.  I tried publicly and privately
several times.  Julie and others were *forced* to follow her around and
clean up after her.

The reason that I didn't want literally to ban Helga (though, as with
others, I told her privately that she should leave) is that I knew it
would be for reasons of content--viz., her content was usually
outrageously biased--and I knew that that would set a dangerous precedent
and would also potentially undermine what moral authority I did have.  I
was *hoping* that we simply never would have to ban people for content,
and that they could be shamed and arm-twisted into behaving.  But our
worst trolls have made it abundantly clear that there are some people who
simply cannot be shamed into doing anything at all.  They *enjoy* both
being the center of attention and disrupting the flow of productive
activity and discussion.  Far from respecting anything like moral
authority, one of their greatest pleasures in life is to flout and
undermine it in whatever forms they find it.

We *do* need an effective way to deal with these people.  We *don't* have
an effective way right now.

For purposes of thinking of a solution, it does help, as much as I hate to
admit it, to think of Wikipedia as a sort of microcosm of society (a
classroom is such a microcosm as well, in some respects--I agree with you
there Ed).  There's much that's disanalogous, but a few principles are the
same:

(1) In the absence of people who are generally respected as in authority,
"rebellion" will continuously break out.

(2) In the same circumstances, the destructive members of society will
tend to push the productive members of society away from active social
intercourse.  (We won't go out at night, as it were; we'll keep to
ourselves.)

(3) As the population (classroom size, Wikipedia editor base) grows, the
need for legitimate authority is made more pressing by ever more constant
disruptions.

We can debate about this, but I hope we can do so reasonably, with a
minimum of fallacy and innuendo.  Let's be up front and explicit.

I hate the idea of a literal "police force."  We have a "militia" but
that's entirely tongue-in-cheek and has no official powers of any sort.

But I think I do like the idea of *moderators*.  My vague, not-entirely-
worked-out idea is a *regularly* changing body of randomly selected but
experienced Wikipedians, something like the Athenian Senate only smaller.
These would not go around and look for infractions of the rules, as police
do.  Rather, their job *while working as moderators* would be to hear
complaints from complainants (self-appointed prosecutors) and arguments on
both or all sides on the incident or issue.  (Of course, they could simply
refuse to "hear" certain petty disputes.)  They would be empowered by the
community to *interpret* rules and make sanctions, much as a court would,
but not actually to *make* rules.  They'd also be empowered to ban vandals
peremptorily, as sysops are now.

This raises a lot of really difficult questions.  How are moderators
selected?  (Perhaps: randomly from some sort of screened pool of qualified
candidates.)  How do we ensure that someone who is a poor judge of the
rules and of situations does not become a moderator?  (Sounds like it
could get very personal--but given what Wikipedia, probably necessarily,
has become, can that be avoided?)  What "rules" would be enforceable?
Doesn't this mean that we should now back away from the "ignore all rules"
thing?  (Reluctantly, I admit, it appears so.)  Will we build a body of
case law?  (Surely.)  How can we put checks on the powers of the
moderators, some of whom will certainly be found to be too immature and
too untrustworthy to have the power?  (By having three moderators working
at once.)  Doesn't this mean an even more baroque power structure?  (No,
I'd tentatively suggest we strip all erstwhile "sysops" of their
too-easily-abusable rights, in favor of this system.)  How do we ensure
that this system isn't abused by people who want to use it as part of
personal vendettas?  (By having multiple moderators who check each others'
work; and by having an explicit rule not to bring "petty lawsuits.")  How
do we avoid "conflicts of interest"?  (Ditto and by making sure that
*certain* people do not hear complaints from *certain other* people.)
What sanctions would the moderators have at their disposal?  (Something
like this: warning; final reprimand; temporary ban; permanent ban with
opportunity for appeal at a later date.)

I am not going to argue for this or elaborate it anytime soon.  (I'd like
to get the Wikipedia peer review project going first:
http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/sifter-l )  But I would lot to
hear nonfallacious, nonvacuous, non-potshot-ish comments about it, if
anyone has any.

Larry