[Wikipedia-l] Our options; *your* opinion requested

Erik Moeller erik_moeller at gmx.de
Mon Nov 11 23:26:00 UTC 2002 

Larry,

good idea. I presume you wrote this before reading my response to your  
last mail, so here are my additions.

> ISSUE 1.  The problem or lack thereof.

> PRO: There is indeed a serious problem now on Wikipedia.  Many newbies
> (and some people who have been here for a while) brazenly violate the
> basic defining rules of our community, and presently, neither peer
> pressure, nor following violators around constantly, nor the occasional
> actual sanction seems to be solving this problem.  Well-respected, clearly
> productive members of the community are driven away by having to deal with
> these people or such behaviors, and this is a really serious problem.

OTHER:
I see two possible problems: a problem of simple, easy to discern  
vandalism and nonsense on the one hand and not so simple to evaluate  
violations of group policy on the other hand. I submit that vandalism is a  
significant and possibly growing problem that is not properly addressed,  
because, while it's simple to solve, too few people are involved in its  
solution (too few sysops), but increasing their number also increases the  
risks of abuse and error. The current administration is therefore not  
scalable.

I do consider the problem of regular users who break rules significant,  
but not urgent, and believe that our policy needs to focus on  
rehabilitation. I further submit that we do, in fact, need a decision  
process to decide which policies we want to enforce against regular users  
and how much leeway we want to give them, i.e. to which extent we want to  
rely on "soft security".

> ISSUE 2.  What to do about the problem, if anything.

OTHER:
The Open Voting Option: Users can create two types of polls, inquiry polls  
(non binding) and policy polls (binding, with enforcement). Only a smaller  
group of users (still larger than the current admin group) can create  
policy polls, but the same group of users (e.g. everyone with >=n  
contributions) can vote in both types of polls. Policy polls can contain  
only specific types of options: ban user X, delete page Y, etc., but still  
follow the same discussion/voting principle.

Polls get their own namespace, and on the page where the poll is, users  
can also provide arguments for or against the different options. So I  
would go to [[Poll:Ban Lir]] and could see the different opinions and vote  
on them.

         PRO                                  CONTRA
         Lir has made many silly              Lir has made xx valuable
         contributions and can't              contributions and is trying
         be trusted                           to improve her behavior

                              VOTE

                              Yes              [ ]
                              No               [ ]
                              Don't care       [ ]
                              More info needed [ ]
                  .. other standard options for policy polls? ..

Inquiry polls would allow the options to be defined freely and primarily  
be used to gather opinions in less extreme conflicts among reasonable  
persons. As voting styles, both first-past-the-post (winner takes all) and  
preferential voting are reasonably simple and should be supported, policy  
polls work better with fpp voting (clearly distinct options).

Recently added polls would be listed on a separate page like  
Recent_changes.  The poll would be closed after a given timespan, defined  
by the person who creates it. For policy polls, depending on the type of  
action, we could set different threshold for whether we want to take it,  
e.g. banning an anon user should be easier than banning a signed in user.  
Minimum number of votes may be necessary, but not too high.

Possible problems:
- we need to develop effective ways to deal with vote flooding in the long  
term (the system can be designed to repel basic attacks)
- ??

Regards,

Erik

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