UDWiki:Open Discussion/Democracy on the wiki

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This is NOT a policy discussion. This is an Open Discussion about an issue regarding the wiki. Please treat it as such and contribute with that in mind.

I am creating this discussion because, for a long time now i have been convinced that the process of deocracy on this wiki is irredeemably flawed (See the wikirant i wrote on the subject of voting at UDwiki:Voting) for several major reasons, which i am reposting here:

1. Most people do not read proposal before they vote - People do not examine a proposal and attempt to understand it before they vote. They are wrecking the democratic process by assuming things are the way they think they are instead of examining to be sure.
2. People often fail to understand proposals - People often do read a proposal, but they fail to fit together all the parts of the proposal and realise how, while each section alone might have flaws by nature, as a whole the proposal is impervious to them.
3. People do not always understand valid reasons for rejection - There may be some automatic rejection criteria, but these criteria are often applied inappropriately.
4. People often vote for irrelevant reasons - This is most common on the deletions page. People vote keep or kill not for valid objections or motivations for keeping a page, such as because its funny to troll another group, or because it annoys people. These undermine the process and prevent people who are genuinely trying to improve the wiki from doing so through democratic processes.
5. People always look at the short term - People always look at the short term effects of things. While things may be happening in the short term, such as drama, flamewars or other such inevitabile hassles that occasionally plague the wiki, people often spring up with policy proposals that people may find palatable as a way to end the current problem, forgetting that such problems are infrequent, and usually center around short lived flashpoints which die down. While policies to prevent the occurance of tthese things may be effective in the short term, in the long term they only work by cracking down on peoples freedom of speech and editing, and leads to more and more needless bureaucracy.
6. People object to decisions based on their opinions of the author or other voters - People often object to proposals simply because people they dont like proposed them. We have all been guilty of this at times. Voting based on the person rather than the policy uindermines the democratic system.
7. Meatpuppets - People often go off to their IRC chat rooms or forums and post the policy/suggestion/deletuion vote and request people who otherwise wouldnt care come in and vote in their favour. This is effectively giving one person a dozen, if not more votes. Excellent examples of meatpuppetry include these suggestions: Link 1 Link 2. The first being a suggestion of mine, the second being the infamous Not have Zombies suggestion, both from 2005 when the zombie community was organised and united enough to perform vote stuffing on such an impressive scale.

Do not get me wrong, Democracy would be a wonderful way to make a decision here, provided everyone acted mature all the time. But they dont. Democracy does not always lead to the best decision, and in several big ones here it has led to the wrong ones. It is my opinion that democracy is not the way the wiki should be run.

So what then? There are all sorts of different mechanisms that could be used, such as dictatorship (Shich works pretty well on the nexus wiki, but wont work here for various reasons, including the fact that its not the home of a community but rather a tool for a community on a forum), there is the concept of nominating certain mature users to make the decisions, but im not particularly find of that one either given human corruptability. My opinion is that we should instead shift from Democracy and majority rule to Concensus, where all points are heard and a decision is made at the end. Such a system would close all the problems i have observed in the democratic process, though, of course, such a system would require an almost complete rebuilding of the administrative structure of this wiki, as well as adding all sorts of definitions on what is and what isnt a valid reason to stand for or against a proposal. Basically, im proposing shifting our system from what we have to something like what Wikipedia has.

Opinions, comments, and anything else are welcome, but please, try to keep this constructive instead of abusive. --The Grimch ^{U! E! WAT!} 06:57, 1 November 2007 (UTC)