User:P,TO 19104/Signpost Draft/T

When someone reads Cabals they often think of how preposterous it would be if Wikipedia had a cabal. There is so much discussion as to making Wikipedia less bureaucratic and tons of proposals are rejected at the village pump just because they promote bureaucracy and/or a unnecessary hierarchy. This is the story of what happened when a WikiProject intended to promote WikiLove and kindness became a cabal that overshadowed the rest of Wikipedia. Someone who has been reading the Signpost for a while might have read the 2019 reruns; however, few know the intricacies of Wikipedia's former cabal, Esperanza.

Beginnings
The Esperanza Association, was a WikiProject was created in a proposal by JCarriker as a way to spread WikiLove/Kindness and was first mentioned in the Signpost on September 2005 in an article that would eventually run again in in February 2019. Esperanza was created with a huge unnecessary hierarchy from the start as a way to make the group seem like a miniature version of the larger English Wikipedia in order to make the project more "approachable". However, the project would be doomed from the start because the project's membership requirements would prohibit new users from joining; thus, the bureaucracy actually made the project less approachable because it was so exclusive and cabal-like.

Esperanza's Bureaucracy
The defining bureaucratic element of Esperanza was its Charter. The Charter was created the cabal, not what governed it; meaning although the Charter was supposed to act as a constitution, it was so overly broad that the Esperanza Bureaucracy could do whatever it wanted.

The membership of Esperanza is one of the first things that the Charter mentions and it states that editors must have made at least 150 edits and has been at Wikipedia for 2 weeks. These stringent rules for membership were enforced because membership of Esperanza was supposed to be exclusive. Although only less than 1% of all editors on Wikipedia were eligible to be an Esperanza member on January 1st, 2007 (when the project was decentralized), at least 10-20% of all editors in this range were apart of the project. This data reflects an astounding amount of eligible editors being involved in just one project. There were 724 members and 10 members-to-be on January 1, 2020, when the project was decentralized.

In the first and second MfDs of Esperanza, the superiority and exclusivity of Esperanza was called into question by many non-members. Ultimately, the Charter had created clique.

Esperanza's bureaucracy was made up of two parts the Administrator General ("AdminGen") and the Advisory Council. The Advisory Council was made up of four members and two tranches (similar to the Arbitration Committee, but smaller). It isn't exactly clear how the Administrator General was elected, but it was likely a position elected by the Advisory Council (with the AdminGen being a member of the Advisory Council as well as holding their position as the coordinator of the project, similar to a Council-manager style of government). The Council ultimately made every decision in the project because its power was so broad (though proposals had to be made by a member of the project, which could be any).

One of the most problematic parts of Esperanza's Council meetings were help on a private IRC where only the council's members were allowed to communicate; thus giving no room for members/non-members to speak at the meetings. The logs of the IRC were only made available after the meeting was held, however there were two caveats to this. First, per Esperanza's Code-of-Conduct, users were never allowed to post the logs of the IRC, otherwise they risked being banned from the IRC; effectively censoring anyone who wished to speak out against any council decision on the IRC. Second, per Esperanza's Charter, the AdminGen controlled and owned the IRC by which the council communicated on.

Finally, critics of Esperanza often mentioned the project's democratic system that was detailed in the Charter which stated:

The consensus building process was never used. To emphasize the importance of consensus, rather than voting, consensus requires a near-unanimity where people build off the ideas of others. In addition, only the members of Esperanza and its bureaucracy could make any decision pertained to the project; which ultimately disenfranchised those who the project pertained to and affected (ex. non-members and new users). Like all things in Esperanza, decisions were made only by the bureaucracy and members of the project, which is really just against every one of Wikipedia's values. To put in perspective, there are currently no community decisions (or otherwise community-affecting decisions) on Wikipedia that are only made by one group of people, excluding decisions by ArbCom and the WMF.

Esperanza at its peak
Esperanza had many programs that it maintained; one of its most popular were its outreach programs that targeted new users like those similar to the Welcoming Committee. There, Esperanza members would help new users getting started with Wikipedia. These programs were the subject of scrutiny in the second MfD by the nominators: "... they’re targeting new and vulnerable users, who then see everything on Wikipedia through green-tinted lenses...". Programs like these possibly gave Esperanza fuel for new members; by the end of Esperanza, there were still 10 members-to-be listed on its members list (which has since been deleted), even though most of the outreach programs had already been deleted prior to the last MfD.

Although most of these programs already existed, Esperanza also had its own programs that were spinoffs of the Welcoming Committee, Kindness Campaign, etc. Esperanza should be given due credit, though, for a few programs that would eventually serve as the forerunners to the modern Birthday Committee and Editor Retention program.

Esperanza also had a "Coffee Lounge" for casual discussion. The Lounge was the subject of criticism in its first and second MfD and would become a symbol of Esperanza's clique. The Coffee Lounge was supposed to a forum for casual discussion among the members of Esperanza. The Coffee Lounge also contained games (like tic-tac-toe, hangman, etc.) that the members could play. However, this page quickly became a forum that would distract Wikipedians from editing, instead of just a place to relax. According to the page statistics of Esperanza's Coffee Lounge, 903 edits were made only by the top 3 editors by edits. In addition, 321 kb of text were added only by the top 3 editors by bytes of the Coffee Lounge.

Esperanza also may have functioned as an policy-determining group, as the revision history of the Esperanza news page suggests that Esperanza at least attempted to change policy on personal attacks.

Why Esperanza failed
Esperanza failed because it undermined Wikipedia's core values. The point of Wikipedia was never to create a democracy and clique. In the end, Esperanza had turned into a dysfunctional political system.

Many users say that Esperanza failed because there was merely no need for such a WikiProject. However, in perspective, there was a need for such a WikiProject that would spread kindness during the time of Esperanza. In reality, the problem eventually became that the project's goals became to broad and the beaurocracy weighed down the project; thus causing the project to become sidetracked.

Hypothetically, a WikiProject without bureaucracy and without such large goals such as Esperanza but with the same intentions as it could probably stay around.