User talk:Tothwolf/rescued essays/AfD: formula for conflict

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Comments: (writing in parts--please let me continue before responding)
 * 1) ' We have here reduced "notable" to "what should be in compendium." "the topic of the article must be considered notable by more than one person, as a bare minimum. "Human knowledge" could mean *all* human knowledge, but an obvious trim is all *shared* knowledge, and not merely shared as a fact, but in an opinion of importance or notability. This standard would be quite sufficient if the body of editors were relatively small and collegial. If it is sufficiently notable to justify holding a debate over its notability, however, it's notable, period, for "debate" *notices* the topic of the article. Once it is "noticed," it is obviously notable. We preserve AfD discussions which are substantially larger, sometimes, than the articles over which debate took place, and which clearly consumed resources more than sufficient to, if applied, remove POV and other content problems from the articles. I don't think it should be controversial to point out the oddity and inefficiency of this.'
 * I think this is the appropriate standard for speedy, but not for notability. At the very least you mean more than that the second the "second" be sincere and based on personal knowledge -- at least -- or, more stringently, on Wikipedia-recognizable reliable source. " Even within your line of reasoning, it must be a person unconnected with the topic being discussed. This is the basic need to avoid WP:COI. Bu I know you discuss later the qualifications for "second editor"....to be contiued


 * 1) 'However, the scale of Wikipedia is not limited, and we can expect it to increase. As the scale increases, there will increasingly be people who will assert notability on the argument that *all* knowledge is notable, or, more narrowly, that all knowledge in their field or in their own personal knowledge, is notable. Is the requirement for a "second" sufficient? I argue that it is, with a major caveat. The caveat is that  Here, again, we get into process. How could we set up process that would not be easily abused?'
 * I think there is a place for more than one source of information in the world. There is a place for something corresponding to the notion of Encyclopedia. DGG (talk) 02:42, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

About "many sources of information."
User:DGG is in the process of writing a comment above, which he's very welcome to continue there, but I'm going to wax a bit on the concept of "many sources of information," which he mentions.

It's essential for freedom of thought and information that there be no monopoly on information and analysis. Indeed, if there are relatively few sources, they can be easily manipulated and controlled. In the Free Associations that I envision, power is never centralized, though there may be what could be called high-level councils, but those councils are only advisors to those "lower" in the structure. "Lower" in this sense only means hierarchically lower, since the power in a Free Association remains at the bottom, *it is not collected,* and the effective power of those at the top is continuously dependent upon the trust vested in them by those below. Those below are free to withdraw that trust, and, because the FA does not concentrate power and because all members are free to act independently, withdrawing that trust is essentially cost-free, unlike traditional organizations where it is, as far as existing management is concerned, "My way or the highway," and the individual members have no realistic options other than withdrawal from the field or tolerance of the status quo.

The power concentration problem has been solved, and the example I point to is Alcoholics Anonymous. For here, though, the point is that control of information and analysis should not be centralized; rather, the more it is distributed, the safer is the system from abuse.

To bring this to the present situation, there is a danger that the owner of Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, could be corrupted by a sufficiently motivated person or organization. The propaganda value of Wikipedia is enormous, it could be worth more money than the members of that board would ever dream of seeing. It would still be quite difficult, for even a corrupt board could not command the allegiance of the huge army of volunteers, the only power it has over them is to ban them or make their participation sufficiently frustrating. I hasten to add that this is all theoretical consideration, I see not the slightest indication that anything like willful corruption has taken place. There is no secret cabal, as such. There are editors who have various points of view who attempt to impose that point of view on Wikipedia, and, I predict, there are editors who will dislike any creation of the necessary communication structures to form the hierarchical structures necessary for true group intelligence, and they will actively oppose them and attempt to sanction such efforts, and there are already examples that look much like this. However, such structures should be independent of Wikipedia itself, for that is what would make them secure from interdiction. It's easy enough to do, mailing lists, and I'd expect to see *many* of them, hosted on servers in many different places.

The content of Wikipedia is usable elsewhere, and it is the content which is the work product of the editor community. It would be a hassle for the community to basically take its marbles away, but the fact that it could -- we could, collectively, easily afford to set up the servers and staff -- would be enough, I'm fairly sure, to prevent any corruption of the Wikipedia process through corrupting the Foundation. Basically, one who wanted to do it would bribe the trustees, but then, if it attempted to counter true consensus among the editor community with pronouncements from on high, the community would leave if organized and prepared, making the bribe worthless. Those who would corrupt on that scale are not usually stupid, they don't like to waste money.

The danger, if there is one, is more subtle. Communities develop bias through the accidents of who is active then they are young, the biases of these participants become tradition and very difficult to challenge later on, it's considered "disruption." However, in my opinion, Wikipedia is open enough and includes sufficient members of sufficient sophistication that it may be possible to break through this limitation, which otherwise could prevent the necessary growth of Wikipedia.

And if Wikipedia does not grow, it will be overshadowed. The vision I'm outlining is not rocket science, I'm pretty sure it will come. The only question is whether or not it will come to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a huge head start, but, again, all the work on Wikipedia is available. Another encyclopedia could start up and simply appropriate all Wikipedia content, adding a validation layer, at the top, and an open submission layer, at the bottom. It's possible that a relatively small number of editors, compared to the huge Wikipedia community, could accomplish this. Further, if there is a peer review process on this new encyclopedia, reviewed and approved articles there will meet the WP:RS requirements. (Technically, these would be article versions, not necessarily the most recent revision; I'd expect to see articles with editors who review and fact-check all edits and articles may possibly have "shadows," subpages where unverified material is placed if no privileged editor has validated it and any editor decides to move it there. So articles would stay validated, if on significant topics, that is, validation would be frequently updated on this to reflect improvements. Underneath that page would be shadow pages, which any editor can read, knowing that information and analysis there has not been validated, and any editor could work on those pages; an editor who finds something there and finds validation, but who is not privileged, could ping a privileged editor and provide him or her with the evidence. How about photocopies of newspaper pages or other library materials? How about responses from experts to solicitations of opinion regarding proposed text.

Wikipedia could *create* peer review or expert commentary, quite like traditional encyclopedias did, *at the same time* as it remains the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Censorship, removing allegedly incorrect or biased material from the project, is not necessary, and wastes a huge amount of time. Rather, the indexes, the hierarchy of information, the categorization, would need more protection and care, to deal with the expansion of raw information. And the protection against corruption of *this* -- which is really the most important structure, for it is analytical and cuts through the information overload of our time -- is that there can be many such structures, they can co-exist, and every action of the people that affects the public database is verifiable. Private communication between them may serve to guide their individual activity and facilitate their cooperation, but, just as the "private analysis" held by User:Durova, the basis for her erroneous block of a user, in the recent incident leading up to her resignation, was ultimately moot until and unless it was reviewed, the block only stood for 75 minutes and would have been reversed if she had not herself realized her error and reversed it, private information may cause errors to be made, if the information is flawed, but the appeal structures that exist limit the possible damage from such.

What is more of a problem is the *lack* of organized structures that can function on the scale of Wikipedia, with rapid response and efficiency as well as security from corruption. ("Corruption," here, means the formation of apparent consensus when that consensus is not real; Wikipedia has no means of rapidly and efficiently finding consensus *for the community*; rather, apparent consensus appears from small groups; if those groups are representative of the community, it works. However, what is the community position on, say, WP:NOTE? How would we know? Have we asked all users? There is a controversy, and, I'm sure, the vast majority of editors -- not to mention readers -- are not aware that it even exists. In an environment like this, participation bias can become huge, because those with an axe to grind will participate in increased numbers. This is a very old problem, it afflicts democratic structures even when they are relatively small. There are two classic solutions, one of which has recently been, in proposal, updated. The classic solutions are (1) representative democracy, where some subset of members is elected; the best of these are Proportional representation systems, and (2) proxy democracy, commonly used in business. The latter does not involve elections (but when it elects a board to exercise day-to-day authority, *then* there are elections, the board is elected by proxies or by shareholders voting directly -- present at the meeting. The proxy democracy is expressed at the Annual Meeting of a corporation, when it elects a board as well as considering shareholder motions.)

What I'm proposing sounds complicated, I'm sure, but actually it is simple, most of this will arise naturally *if it is not prevented*. The danger is in the prevention, and that is precisely the danger of the deletionist perspective. We have already seen structures arise in the Wikipedia community, spontaneously and voluntarily, not exerting any abusive authority, not violating any policies or guidelines, that were interdicted, project pages frozen, salted, with what I see as a pseudo-consensus acting to control the free cooperation of others. Esperanza stands out. Esperanza had no power to control anyone. It made decisions that were allegedly "binding," but that description is not terribly accurate, for no editor has the power to force any other editor to do anything, outside the administrative powers, which cannot actually punish, the maximal "punishment" is a ban from editing, which certainly the Esperanza Advisory Council had no power to do. It could not freeze articles; it had no power that did not flow through voluntary cooperation. Esperanza had what I would consider a defective structure, but that structure was quite a traditional one; my concern is that *non-members* of Esperanza acted to disband it. And the only reason they were able to accomplish this is that Esperanza was organized using the resources of Wikipedia. Had Esperanza not been so naive, it could have accomplished all of its noble goals while not being subject to sanction and interdiction at all. It's worth reading the final deletion review,

I find it shocking. Wikipedia manages to appear to be run by community consensus because the community mostly avoids participating in any particular decision. The Esperanza deletion discussion demonstrated an astonishing level of incivility, and there is no reason to think that Esperanza *caused* that incivility; it was, in fact, founded partly as an attempt to address incivility. Esperanza was a group of people voluntarily associating with each other toward a cooperative end. The basic argument against Esperanza seemed to be that it had closed structures, particularly the Advisory Council. Yet closed structures are essential to intelligence, that is, if access to structural pathways is not limited, they become, with scale, impossibly complex, discussions become tedious, and only fanatics or perhaps a few with extraordinary patience survive to the end. Wikipedia without hierarchy *of a kind* will become increasingly impossible to maintain as a coherent structure that is also open and free.

The Esperanza hierarchy, that was considered so offensive, was an advisory hierarchy, it did not command. I think it could have been done much better, but meeting privately is essential when dealing with problems of major incivility and the like. Arbcomm meets privately whenever it needs to consider confidential evidence, and Arbcomm members -- like anyone -- are free to hold individual nonpublic discussions. ArbComm is, in fact, the Wikipedia equivalent of the Esperanza Advisory Council, except with teeth, such teeth as are possible here. What about Esperanza inspired these comments:

Kill with Fire and Brimstone ... This project is reduced to squabbling amongst itself, whining, and complaining.

Best to smash delete rip maim kill destroy burn with fire and brimstone delete.

Telling is the comment from the founder of Esperanza, which I'll quote here:

I would have preferred not to know about this—most certainly while it is in progress. Unfortunately, even though I am retired from actively editing Wikipedia I still have regular social interactions with wikipedians, even more so than when I was a regular contributor, and could not avoid hearing about this. Since Esperanza was originally my idea and was originally housed in my user space, I feel somewhat obliged to comment on its end. I am not surprised by this outcome. Despite the good intentions and great efforts of many wikipedians, Wikipedia has become an increasing uncivil and uncooperative environment, and it is no surprise that Esperanza—as a part of wikipedia—fell pray to this spirit and was unable to change it. Esperanza has failed, and if the community feels that it has become a burden rather than a boon to the encyclopedia then it should be shut down. Those of you that think this is the end of such things are sadly mistaken, the sense of community here is broken and the factionalism will continue to harden. One needs to look no further than the above; in between the well-reasoned votes one finds votes that take a line of incivility that at once would never have been tolerated here. This unnecessary vitriol has increasing crept into wikipedia, not just about the deletion of Esperanza but in nearly all major policy disagreements and article disputes. There will be other fights, other words, other recriminations, and accusations of attacks that will only grow in their scale so long as this behavior is tolerated and encouraged. Reading over the previous nomination, I find myself shocked and ashamed by the behavior of many on both sides. Looking over other pages, I find examples of similar behavior. Wikipedia can easily survive without Esperanza, but it cannot survive without civility and the sense of community cooperation that the building of this encyclopedia is founded on. -JCarriker 13:05, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Esperanza has this: "This essay serves as a warning to all editors that existing projects must be open and transparent to all editors at all times, not to be overly hierarchical lest they are to meet a fate similar to Esperanza's."

Indeed. Since response to scale requires hierarchical structure in order to maintain intelligent function, I take a different lesson from this. Don't create hierarchical structures that depend for survival on the sufferance of fools. "Hierarchical structures" are not necessarily oppressive and closed, they can be created from the bottom up, and this is the model that the evolution of intelligence followed. What the crushing of Esperanza showed was that this community can be extraordinarily cruel and controlling. If users want to "waste" their time with "bureaucracy" that costs those who do not support it nothing, that has no coercive power, it's oppressive to *prevent* them.

The Esperanza precedent may well mean that the necessary structures for the encyclopedia that is the "sum of all human knowledge" cannot reside on Wikipedia servers. Certainly it is not necessary that they do. The validation mechanisms and the sublayers, secure from arbitrary deletion, can exist elsewhere without the necessity of duplicating all the Wikipedia effort; those who want to do this simply do it. The GDFL license makes that possible, and external structures can point to fixed revisions of articles that have been validated. Increasingly, though, if this is the path taken, Wikipedia will become more and more irrelevant. If I were advising the Foundation, I'd be quite concerned about this. This is the end of the deletionist path, the attempt to control what is and what is not "knowledge."

Besides, Esperanza had a really nice logo:

Proof positive that Esperanza was worthy of eradication: those members wasted time creating a logo when they could have been editing articles.

Comments and Discussion

 * you asked me for comment, and it will take a while to do one adequately. But what you are proposing is a different encyclopedia. There might a place for an encyclopedia edited by self-generated group process, and this is an experiment at it. I think the experiment should be continued, as it has proven remarkably successful. Other experiments are also available, and perhaps the best known of them is citizendium, which relies ultimately on expert certification of articles. unfortunately, even the most rigorous expertise is no proof against divisive POV--the more expert, the better able to do it. many of the same articles as give trouble here give trouble there, and conflicts over some of them have led to people leaving that project. In the other direction, there is Wikinfo,  where "Generally, the main article on a subject should present the subject in a positive light or as a concept which makes sense. Alternative or critical perspectives should be placed in linked articles," and any sources and original research can be used.


 * Your views about the rise and benefits of informal publication is in my opinion correct--except that it has not happened yet in most subjects. In some it has--and in a few of them, such as science fiction criticism and unix-relted topics, otherwise deprecated sources are in fact admitted as proof of notability. But these are done essentially on the basis of personal knowledge by a considerable number of WP editors.


 * Which leads to your suggestion of a second from a WP certified editor as demonstrating notability. to be continued. DGG (talk) 01:14, 29 December 2007 (UTC)


 * It should be understood that what I'm proposing is *not* Citizendium, though I consider it desirable to attract editors who are experts, and possibly to flag and validate that. I agree that "expert" is all-too-often not a synonym for "unbiased," and I've seen examples up close and personal. I'm actually astonished at the garbage that gets published, sometimes, in peer-reviewed journals (by which I mean obvious opinion, that would not survive a day on Wikipedia, presented as if it were fact); a common cause of this is that reviewers may be expert in one field, and journals are for that field, but the expertise necessary to recognize an error may come from other fields. My own opinion is that "self-generated group process" is actually the solution, it is, indeed, the only solution that can handle the scale involved, *but* hierarchy is essential. The knee-jerk rejection of hierarchy is based on an assumption, easy to understand, that hierarchy is imposed from the top, oppressive, for this is the only kind of hierarchy that most are familiar with. If they looked at themselves, at their own mind, and even more at what we now know about the nervous system, they would see, however, a different kind of hierarchy, one organized from the bottom, according to natural connections between neurons. There is no "top-dog" neuron, and can we imagine how stupid the individual would be if there was one? The intelligence would be limited by the capacity of that single neuron. This is a rough explanation of why democracy, with all its inefficiency, is *more successful* than dictatorship, *if* the organizational structures of the democracy are sufficient to maintain coherence. Otherwise the coherence of dictatorship, though it is limited by the power of the one person, outweighs the theoretical group intelligence of the democracy by allowing rapid response to emerging situations. My work is with technology -- methods and organizational principles -- to empower bottom-up hierarchy, making it efficient.


 * Wikipedia is extraordinarily inefficient, and it is this that will kill it if not addressed. There is a huge reservoir of initial energy and goodwill, and it's like a Ponzi scheme, but it is burning out editors, as they see their work slowly slip from view with time, and, like all Ponzi schemes, it may seem successful while it is growing, but when it reaches its market limit, it will collapse unless something changes. Articles don't just converge on consensus through the efforts and cooperation of editors, they also disintegrate and devolve if not maintained against incursion from POV and ignorance. Which of these forces is stronger depends on what community of editors happens to be involved at the time; the structure creates, automatically, communities of editors who have an article watched; but this slips away as these editors, who participated in the consensus that formed the article in a relatively stable and successful shape, move on to other interests, and many leave Wikipedia, quite a few with some level of disgust and burnout.


 * The situation with experts is truly problematic. As I've mentioned, I've too many times seen experts comment on Wikipedia as impossible to deal with. Instead of harnessing experts -- as any traditional encyclopedia would -- it is almost as if they are driven away, and so blatant errors that an expert would notice immediately sometimes survive for a long time. Experts aren't about to spend the serious editing time necessary to review an article and insure that the content is correct (sourcing is a separate thing, and it's easy to have errors that are, apparently, properly sourced, even to the extent that a naive reader who checks the source will walk away thinking the article is correct, but an expert will know that the source has been misread). Why not? Because they know that it's quite likely wasted work, they will come back next day or next week or next year and it's gone, the article has degenerated. It's Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill.


 * This problem is really the same as with article deletion. The problem is the categorization of content. It's trickier to solve with internal article content, but I see the solution as involving version review, with articles being forked into at least two versions: a default version which is seen by casual readers of the encyclopedia, and an "emerging" version that is actively being edited. The emerging version may contain brilliant new results from dedicated and careful research by any reader, or may contain utter nonsense, but then the problem reduces to periodic verification of new edits, and there will be points where the emerging article becomes the validated one. (I'm not sure of the most efficient way to do this, to have indexes to specific validated historical versions, or to have frozen mainspace versions or some other scheme.)


 * It is still a distributed structure, a user-generated encyclopedia. But with structures that allow the categorization of knowledge, in this case into two basic categories: verified, judged reliable by consensus, and unverified or seriously controversial, possibly of interest, useful for allowing the main article to grow, but not to be trusted without verification. With verification, Wikipedia (the verified articles) could be more reliable, better checked, deeper, more accurate, than any current peer-reviewed publication. The consensus of community is extraordinarily powerful, but to achieve it requires, for it to work on a large scale, hierarchy. Consensus process begins to break down seriously with as few as twenty members. This is where Delegable Proxy -- Liquid democracy -- comes in. Ad hoc, built from the bottom up by voluntary individual choices, no bureaucracy, only used as needed. (It's much simpler than the Liquid democracy article might make people think, *particularly when the goal is consensus, not "vote."*) What DP structures can do is to make the negotiation of consensus rapid by essentially reducing the effective scale; DP can theoretically reduce a group of any size to a group of any desired smaller size, down to a minimum size limited by the effective number of "factions" considered significant.


 * To create structures that will validate articles takes a capacity to make decisions on a large scale. There can be independent validating structures, it is not necessary that there be only one; indeed, there could be some good reasons to have more than one, just as there could be independent hierarchical structures organizing articles for coherent access; another way of thinking of this is different indexes to articles. I haven't explored what is currently in use with Wikipedia, I'm sure there is already a lot of this in place. But article validation is not in place, to my knowledge.


 * It does not have to be a central function, and, I'm arguing, it should not be. Rather, as one way of approaching it, self-defined organizations can arise and create validating structures using their own procedures. There might be such an organization that corresponded to today's deletionists. Such an organization could tag articles with templates or the like that serve to index the articles, so, to make up some tags that might arise, there could be a nihi obstat and imprimatur tag issued by an organization with expert Catholic members able to give authoritative approval of the Church to content. In no way is this censorship, it is, in fact, the opposite: approval, of meaning only to those who are either seeking to limit themselves to such content, or to others who want to know what is and what is not acceptable to the Church, officially. Accessing Wikipedia through the assistance of an interface which uses those tags would provide, essentially, a Catholic Wikipedia. Similarly, there would be scientific organizations validating articles in fields of science. I do not see these organizations as consisting exclusively of scientists. What I do see, though, is consideration of credentials, not as proof, but in terms of measuring consensus in a field; it's common, in my experience, to see some scientific consensus asserted when it does not exist, and the reverse, to see claim of the existence of no consensus, but based merely on the existence of a few mavericks.


 * The validating organizations can be entirely independent of Wikipedia, and they could create independent interfaces to Wikipedia content. Given the hostility to hierarchical structures that was seen in the Esperanza case, that might be advisable! Likewise the open, inclusive encyclopedia could be independent of Wikipedia, though interwiki complexities could militate against that. Does Wikipedia really want the average reader to submit articles somewhere else? That's what the deletionists claim should happen. But why should I submit an article to Wikipedia if I could submit it to another wiki and see it automatically submitted as well to Wikipedia? Except that in this case, it's not going to get deleted, period, unless it's illegal or offensive. If I really think that my kitchen sink is fascinating, I can write about it. That isn't happening so much now (it *is* happening, to be sure, but not on a Wikipedia scale), but that's because the integration isn't in place. Yet. Eventually, this path leads to the increasing irrelevancy of Wikipedia itself. So I'm arguing that inclusionism is inevitable, for deletion is highly inefficient. I don't bother deleting email any more, most of it. I do have a spam filter than catches most spam, but I have it set so as not to miss any legitimate mail, so it necessarily lets some spam through. It just sits there, it's not worth deleting. I sort legitimate mail with filters, and find mail that isn't easily categorized with searches. Deletion requires attention, that's the problem. Much easier to ignore irrelevant material, and the disk space is much cheaper than my time. --Abd (talk) 03:18, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

tl;dr
tl;dr Cliff (talk) 22:05, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
 * On second review, my biggest problem is that there is no TOC, Subject headings, or immediately visible organization. If I had an overview, I would be more likely to read. Cliff (talk) 22:08, 17 March 2011 (UTC)