User:Rick Block/trolls, vandals, and POV pushers

When Wikipedia started (before I was around) it was a relatively small group of contributors who basically all shared the same philosophy and were a more or less cohesive community. The consensus processes all reflect that (relatively) idyllic beginning. With more and more participatation from more and more people, I fear it may have reached the point where the direct democracy approach has started to break down. Considering the ancient Greek democracy vs. the Roman representative democracy seems perhaps useful. One possible change would be to restrict voting, in all forums, to elected representatives. I think some folks already view admins as having that sort of role (although this is distinctly not the current role of admin). It's clear to me that there aren't any statistically valid polls anymore - since all the polls are self selecting and the number of voters is miniscule compared to even the number of reasonably active users. Instituting a representative voting system, and requiring some percentage of the representatives to vote seems like it might help.

Another issue that comes from wikipedia's popularity, and its role as a reference, is that it is attracting folks who want it to reflect their POV (he who controls the presses controls popular opinion). POV pushing is, I think, worse than vandalism because it is harder to recognize and doesn't really have any consequences. Given an open wiki, I'm not sure this is fixable but a start might be to put some real teeth behind NPOV and start banning POV pushing users. I suspect this can't really be done without first fixing the "consensus" issue.

Without doing either of these, ultimately somebody will fork a copy and start over. Given how many people have left because of trolls/vandalism/POV I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't happened already. There is a wikipedia 1.0 project. I'm not sure if it's still active, but maybe it's time to really figure out how to make this happen. It could be that the right way to do this is to have a "1.0" fork, readable by the world but with a restricted population of editors, fed by the existing wikipedia.