User:Bri/Governance

Examining the politics of the wiki and sometimes the limits of patience in trying to craft consensus. We tend to be driven from one crisis to another and when things are "good enough" they are left that way.

Characteristics
In many ways this place is, unfortunately, a structure characterized by extreme conservatism and resistance to change. This becomes a paradox of a rigid bureaucracy yet without complete rules or any real administrative review system. At the best of times it gives us individual freedom as long as we don't color outside the lines egregiously. At the worst, it is governed by personality and sniping.

Not just that but based on my observation of routine conduct at ANI, described by others as "the peanut gallery", I think some here actually enjoy the spectacle of non-cooperation and enjoy feeding the flames.

How to change the rules? Major new initiatives like WP:ACTRIAL are few and far between and characterized by much rancor. They must be shepherded by someone with not just a lot of chutzpah and vision but staying power against community inertia. How to change the culture is an even harder nut to crack. Getting the right people into leadership positions is part of it IMO. Then demanding leadership behavior.

WP:MEDRS is, I think, one of our huge successes and depends on some fairly rigorous standards and people willing to apply them. It is de facto driven by a committed core group. How this evolved and how to extend the concept to other areas might be a fruitful area of research.

Monkeywrenching
Hand in hand with passive or inattentive conservatism runs a strong group of active opponents of change. Some tactics employed appear indistinguishable from traditional monkeywrenching. If a discussion of a change appears, note the following employed by opposed parties:
 * Propose as many counter-proposals as possible to deflect support for one
 * Propose changes of venue
 * Ad-hominem: proposer is biased because of _____
 * Cronyism: proposers pose false consensus because of _____ (see also change of venue)
 * Bring up objections based on "this didn't work before/this never works"
 * Appeal to FUD especially wiki bugaboos like risk of exposure of online identities, handing control to the Foundation or admin cabal

This exposes a weakness of the wiki's political system, in that there is no robust consensus-gaining process that involves a core constituency and keeps them on target. Weak leadership leads to ineffective results.

Admin theory
I don't necessarily subscribe to everything listed here but they provide interesting perspectives on the role of admins.


 * Wikipedia needs more administrators
 * The best and most essentially encyclopaedic articles of social, scientific, geographical, and biographical content have probably been submitted and the encyclopaedia now needs more persistent and accurate quality control to keep it free of spam, copyvio, sockpuppetry, vandalism, tabloid news, and people, bands, and companies of doubtful notability. —User:Kudpung/RfA criteria
 * User:WereSpielChequers/RFA reform
 * creating a wikigeneration divide between an active editing community many of whom have been with us for less than two years and a large majority for less than four, and an admin community, none of whom have been here less than a year, less than 1% have been editing for one to two years and the vast majority have been editing for more than five years
 * Hammersoft "A look at Wikipedia:RFA by month should convince anyone that the heyday of RfA has long, long since passed. That's just one of many examples of processes that are dying or have already died. Another; the candidates running for ArbCom this year and last year numbered 12. The last five years before that averaged 19.8 candidates. That's nearly a 40% drop off in candidates. As the pool of available editors diminishes, so to do various processes begin to end."

Admin selection criteria

 * Category:User essays on adminship
 * Balloonman
 * WereSpielChequers
 * Wisdom89

Ambassador theory

 * Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/Special report