Moved away from CrazyThingsThatMightSaveWiki.
The problem with C2 wiki, and it's one that afflicts all wikis everywhere, is fundamental to the wiki nature. It's reconciling irreconcilable differences between its members. Everything else, edit wars, delete/restore wars, scripts, are all just trivial symptoms of this one fundamental problem.
And it affects communities everywhere - online, face-to-face, and in non-Internet media. I remember fights in the 1980s (in the U.S.) over the proper use of citizens band radio.
One solution proposed on this page is to start accepting possession and property on wiki, to give up on the NobleExperimentInTotalitarianCommunismFlames? that has been C2 and accept the realities of human nature.
Usenet has had to do that and it's adopted moderators as a solution. A sort of benevolent dictatorship to replace the totalitarian communism.
Human moderators is a workable solution; but not without its own problems.
- Some moderators are assholes who abuse their power
- Conversely, some users are assholes who cry "fascist!" whenever a moderator steps on their toes or censors their favorite rant.
- Moderators don't always scale well; especially for a popular forum that gets thousands (if not more) posts/edits a day. (One of my favorite portals/blogs is Linux Today; it's a moderated site. And while the moderator(s) do good work, they frequently are a bottleneck.)
- Who chooses the moderator?
The scheme that's actually proposed for wiki is based on administrators, not moderators. There's a pretty critical difference. Moderators approve posts whereas administrators approve and revoke people. As for who chooses the administrators, that would be whoever wishes to administer them
, and so on regressing back to whoever's the top administrator (human or robot) on the wiki. Choosing administrators is a secondary question that can be held off until we have a general scheme that allows users to freely choose other users to administer.
[Discussion moved from CrazyThingsThatMightSaveWiki; contains a bit of a FlameWar]
I've thought for about 15 years (certainly since before the web was added to the net - I was an early cypherpunk) that cryptographically secure web of trust is the ultimate answer to any such thing, but I must admit that its application to c2 would be a truly massive shift. It will happen net-wide eventually, but the sea change hasn't even begun.
[Maybe WikiNeedsTrustMetrics but that's LetsWithdrawIntoSolipsism]
Any form of control (except perhaps requiring a delay before content is duplicated) has no significant effect on content that relates to a controversial topic. The discussion will become dull and poorly-argued if you restrict either content or contributors.
I would call that a consideration to watch out for, not an absolute rule. After all, moderated newsgroups on Usenet are (by and large) a counterexample.
Can you be more specific, by giving a url where an interesting, well-argued, on-going discussion can be seen? . What happens to a contribution which is put forward in good faith, but simply wrong?
- I experienced Usenet going to hell in a handbasket, and saw signal to noise become pure noise, and saw the rise of moderated groups. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, etc. Rising from the ashes were groups such as sci.physics.research. The moderators, while not perfect, allow naive questions and non-mainstream views, up to some fuzzy boundaries; ArchimedesPlutonium's views that the universe is a single plutonium atom don't get much discussion, being previously familiar to all participants. Jack Sarfatti posts were typically allowed last time I looked (he's a brilliant and highly mathematical physics guy who, to do him very mild injustice for the sake of brevity, is an alien abductee and future Star Trek crewman, and discusses highly opaque but clearly non-mainstream issues in theoretical physics in support of his delusions). Homework questions are rejected. Undergrad-level comments about the twin paradox are merely directed to the more appropriate group sci.physics.relativity, whether confused or accurate.
- The tolerance of dissenting views depends on the view and the group. Moderated e.g. women's, feminist, motss groups reject precisely the kinds of highly predictable dissenting views that you would expect and hope them to reject. Not every group has had benevolent moderators, of course; some people let the power go to their heads, which has certainly caused problems for particular groups. I'm not claiming Usenet is a paradise due to moderation, just that it has success stories. But it had problems even before the great unwashed masses went online.
In general, it shouldn't be possible for people to inflict their unwelcome presence when they are incapable of being thoughtful and
sane on the subject matter. Yet this is a real problem which measurably limits the range and quality of discussion on wiki. The fact that wiki has no protection against vandals, well that just sucks big time. --
RichardKulisz
- Richard - you wrote this, it got deleted. Since you wrote it, by restoring it you are to my mind violating the DeleteOnceRestoreOnce principle. Note that I neither deleted it nor restored it, but I would be interested in knowing whether you accept the DeleteOnceRestoreOnce principle as being a GoodThing, or if you renounce it as being completely pointless, naive and doomed to failure. -- CW
- Naive and doomed to failure? Certainly. The facts bear me out on this. The presence of abusers and narrow-minded butchers doom the principle to failure. CostinCozianu certainly never adheres to DeleteOnceRestoreOnce, no matter how many different people restore a page he doesn't like. And given the asymmetry between deletes and restores, it should really be DeleteOnceRestoreThrice?, as pointed out elsewhere. -- RK
- So because the world is full of abusers and narrow-minded butchers who refuse to adhere to it, you denounce DeleteOnceRestoreOnce and likewise refuse to adhere to it? Noted. -- CW
- I take it you're a hard-line pacifist who'd never lift a finger against someone in self-defense? -- RK
- Discussion moved to NobleExperimentInTotalitarianCommunismFlames?
- The discussion is moot. DeleteInsults takes precedence over any DeleteOnceRestoreXxx? scheme. Also common sense and personal responsibility should take precedence over any mechanical scheme. Going mechanical is the recognition of total failure. -- CC
- Yeah, like the mechanical deletion of an entire paragraph because it contains one word of insult. -- RK
- One word of insult, dishonest lies, etc. You can discuss precisely the issues you want to raise under WikiArena topic, including your allegations that I'm abusing you. You can't claim that you can't have a honest and rational discussion with CostinCozianu, because everybody will be laughing at you. It's the credibility that you built yourself. If you know that it's going to be deleted because it contains insults, the solution is very simple: don't write those insults to begin with. You have no standing to impose upon my goodwill or the goodwill of wiki gnome to spend the effort to edit out insults from your writings. You can do that yourself, or the more obvious solution don't put those insults to begin with. Don't tell me that a smart guy like you, can't figure this out for himself. -- CC
[agree with deletion except:]
Wiki is certainly suffering the conflict clash problems that Usenet suffered. It shouldn't be possible for a pro-war American extremist to inflict their presence or delete the content of a page or set of pages discussing what can be done to prevent an American war. Some pages are built upon certain assumptions which all members must hold for any civilized discussion to take place and people who radically violate these assumptions simply don't belong there.
- Should it be possible, then for an anti-war extremist to inflict his/her presence or delete the content of a page or set of pages discussing whan can be done to start an American war? Not that I'm suggesting such a discussion occur, mind you...
- [Yes, it certainly should be possible. Just like it should be possible for right-libertarians and AynRand lovers to spout their ignorant claptrap without reality seeping in, so long as they explicitly decide to make this the case and that it is obvious that this is the case.]
The above claim has nothing to do with WardsWiki as I know it. I think that Ward is at best mildly amused by idiocies like FascistStateOfAmerica? that were temporarily tolerated only to allow some wiki lurkers to vent off their frustration. As far as it was once decided to move all religion related page off this wiki, for well thought reasons spelled out by Ward himself, and that decision was proven to improve wiki, I see no reason in the world why it should not be decided again to MoveItElsewhere for a whole bunch of other OffTopic pages, should it be necessary. Usage of WikiWiki to promote whatever ideologies, political views, etc. is in my opinion a blatant abuse of this particular wiki.
If Richard wants anarcho-communist ideologies to be promoted without anybody else disturbing his sense of righteousness, BenKovitz has graciously donated space. Other freely available wiki spaces abound, as well as UseNet, blogs and other fora. If RK thinks he can discuss how to prevent the next american war, he has all my simpathy: MoveItElsewhere. There's no justification whatsoever for RK, AynRand fan club or anybody else, to abuse this space in order to promote particular interests that have nothing to do with WikiMission.
The pages that are on topic, have never ever generated as much heat as to constitute a real problem. If there ever have been irreconcilable differences about technical issues, and subjectivity can also be a big factor on technical issues as well, we could summarize pro and contra arguments, one position versus the other, who holds what view. It is that simple. I can accept that EricHodges holds an honest (but subjective) view that LongFunctions are always a plague -- no exception granted to me so far , and in the end I can't bring enough arguments to the contrary -- those arguments being themselves subjective. But it was the experience of this community that similar controversies on off-topic pages such as politics, religion, philosophy are likely to generate more heat than light, not to mention that the heated debates happens at a ridiculously amateurish level. --CostinCozianu
Usenet moderators rightly reject posts when a newsgroup for members of the same sex receives posts from trolling heterosexuals, or newsgroups dedicated to women have men coming in to inflict their unwelcome presence, or the same with feminist newsgroups and rabid mysoginists. The same should happen on wiki pages.
- But, who exactly is WWW for? Is it specified anywhere?
- That's like asking who air is for. If anyone specified who is and is not allowed to breathe, it wouldn't matter that they said that. Ultimately, air (and the Internet) is for approximately everyone, short of strangulation/Chinese government.
- Usenet group moderation was in fact highly disapproved by a minority when it first started to be introduced, on e.g. philosophical grounds. Not all groups are moderated, though, and anyone can create a new alt.* group, so...actually I don't want to get into it too much. It's a book length subject to explain in full detail.
- To clarify one point, however, typically moderators screen each and every post for a particular newsgroup to ensure that that post's content matches the charter of the newsgroup, as voted upon when the newsgroup was created. Individual moderators may get fed up with some particular individual, but banning people is not an inherent part of the moderation system. Those moderators typically never moderate other newsgroups, and any individual is free to post any rejected material to a different newsgroup that is more appropriate, not moderated, or both. So it's not all that tyrannical of a system, although as has been mentioned several times, it's not absolutely perfect. It is intended primarily to rescue groups that would otherwise have become literally useless due to excessive noise, including but not limited to spam.
Would the concept of DoubleWiki, which can be implemented using current wiki technology, be an acceptable solution to irreconcilable differences? -- dl
CategoryWikiProgress
Reconciling Irreconcilable Differences On Wiki