User talk:Scott MacDonald/Community Advisory Council

There is one key problem which is well-nigh insurmountable -- there is no "community" of any value on Wikipedia - just a bunch of passers-by who happen to !vote for whatever reason on whatever issue catches their eyes. People who make thousands of bot edits or who greet every new editor or who simply correct en-dash usage are of equal value with those who work on making the system function (I count actual writing of articles, real discussion about article, and real discussion about project operations all to be of higher value than of those prior groups).

I would further suggest that the original concept of "senators" would be of greater value than any "elected committee" or council. We have already seen how efficient the current system is with the mukti-year discussions on "pending changes."

Thus I would suggest that a non-elected senate would have power to establish over-riding policies, subject only to a veto by a "community consensus" in the event the senate over-reaches would be of likely stronger benefit to the project than any "elected" group has ever been in the past. To prevent transient effects, I would suggest such a senate have 31 members, and require a 2/3 majority to enact any policy changes or additions.

The concept of any council holding (interminable) hearings I fear would be exactly what we had with "pending changes." In fact, I think it is the length of ArbCom cases which has reduced the actual influence of that committee.

Would such a senate be a panacea? Nope. Wikipedia's model of government may be worded as "structured anarchy" at best. Would it solve some of the current problems? Yep.

How to choose such a committee? I think it would take a brave committee, armed with actual c.v.s, looking for people who have sufficient experience and temperament in operating within such a structure, representing a broad geographical, social and political cross-section of editors, willing to remove themselves from the editorial fray while seeking to produce sound policies to last for the next decade. Collect (talk) 21:02, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Yup. But you know joke about the man who asked for directions to India, and was told "well, if I was going to India I wouldn't start from here." The problem with any idealised solution is that it falls because of the very problem it is trying to solve. The problem is that Wikipedia has not the mechanisms to assess and effect real change. Your solution is a real change - which means it can't happen. Unless the Foundation step in, which isn't going to happen, all you've got is the current model, and whatever residual AUTHORITAH Jimbo possesses (and that's untested). The point of my idea of an election is that the election would lend legitimacy. You can establish a senate by someone's dictat, but what will you do when everyone in a voluntary community ignores them? So, given where we are, how do we move somewhere else? The consensus model we have exists only by default and history, but you have to start there.--Scott Mac 21:34, 22 December 2012 (UTC)


 * "You can't get theah from heah"?  If people do not suggest "real change" then of course "real change" can not happen.  What is necessary is for people to actually suggest it, and figure that we can at least move off of dead center where absolutely nothing ever really gets done.  In the ArbCom election, I at least tried to find candidates who were not going to be Drew Barrymore in "50 First Dates" who would reinvent every decision of ArbCom over and over and over, making instant U-turns from year to year.  Collect (talk) 23:26, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has no shortage of people suggesting real change. You wanna count the bright ideas for reforming adminship? The problem is implementing any of them in the current methods we have for governance. The whole thing is just hypothetical rumination unless you start by saying "this is where we are" and "here's an idea that we just might be able to actually implement". The problem isn't lack of imagination, it is total structural inertia.--Scott Mac 23:50, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Aim for a new area of contribution, not a new 'council' of current contributors
I like the idea, though I don't think this implementation would be efficient or sufficient.

It's hard to describe a solution starting with no way to differentiate current contributors. If you only use a single set of words for 'community' then it's easy for people to make many negative "can't happen" responses, based on the facet of community they see or don't see.[1]

We certainly do have communities of focused practice in areas where continuous skilled contribution is needed, there are short turnaround times to demonstrate whether an effort was successful, and there's enough demand for such work that those responding to the backlog can find one another's recent changes and work together on shared projects. And they develop scripts, templates, guidelines, messageboards, &c. to support them.

The same was once true for policy development - initial policy creation followed a number of years across many older wikis where philosophers of writing and collaboration had built templates and processes and language to quickly describe patterns and antipatterns that supported or opposed collaborative work. The group interested in that layer of wiki development has largely left - they were drawn to that process, to barnraising and successful nomic games and communities of practice, more than to encyclopedia writing or vandal-fighting.

There's no reason it can't be true again for any cleanly-defined area of content curation or policy creation or reformation. But the group interested in and good at such things would be different again - no need to assume they overlap with those good at spam protection or high-speed editing or content backlogs or page design.

If such work is to be successful it would need to be more than just a handful or a few dozen people on a council; it would need to be a recognized type of contribution that is welcome in its own right; and people encouraged to take it on, try it on for size, see which parts fit. If we just appoint some people we alredy know and trust a lot, who may burn out on this sort of work, and ask them to commit to doing it for a long period of time (or concede personal defeat), that's a recipe for an unhealthy and only somewhat-productive body... which by its existence may cause more negative work than positive [things that currently happen may be put off and queued up for 'the council' the way that the much simpler processes of community blocks or bans are sometimes negated by / converted into drawn-out arbitration cases].

– SJ + 21:38, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

[1] how did the blind men describe the elephant -- snake, spear, fan, wall, tree, rope?