Wikipedia:Advisory Council on Project Development/Issues/Community decision making

Background Analysis

Note, this is a beginning draft. All the points in this analysis need to be linked to pages and discussions that illustrate the issue. If you feel that anything is missing, please add it. This analysis should also be edited to make it as NPOV as possible.

The wiki process has been established in Wikipedia by its founding policies and has developed over time. The process assumes that people will be bold in their editing of articles and policies, and have discussions leading to consensus when there is disagreement. Many disagreements are not easily resolved. Usually, one of the following things will happen with contentious issues:

• Behavior related conflicts might go to arbitration by the ArbCom, leading (eventually) to a ruling.
• Editors might agree to mediation.
• There will be a straw poll or some other quasi-democratic attempt to make a decision.
• A request for comment might collect community opinion.

All of these community procedures have problems:

• Scale: Wikipedia has grown exponentially since its founding. Decisions that were made after discussions by small groups of dedicated editors have since become much more cumbersome as the number of people involved grows larger and larger. As the discussions grow bigger, the larger the number of opinions, and the amount of text the discussion generates becomes huge. The more text, the harder it becomes for community member to read through the discussion and understand the issues being discussed.

• Process: There is no widely accepted way to reach consensus when the process breaks down. The process to be used to make a decision is usually decided in an ad hoc fashion by a single individual or small group of editors such as a single editor calling for a request for comment. Because there is not a clearly understood process, a good deal of effort gets side-tracked into discussing how to proceed, often leading into meta-disagreements.

• Forum: Issues get discussed all over the place. There is a modest attempt to maintain a centralized index of issues, but it is often at the end-stage of the process, when specific proposals are being considered. Lack of centralized forum for discussion means that discussions are duplicated or not linked to many places.

• Participation: The lack of a clear forum sometimes leads to small groups that organize to discuss important issues. These groups can very easily misrepresent the larger community. The voluntary nature of the wiki leads people to self-select the forums in which they get involved. This leads to deletionists being attracted to Xfd discussions, politicos being attracted to policy issues, etc... Editors who like to argue may be attracted to disagreements while editors who don't may stay away. Editors who like to express their opinions may be attracted to requests for comment, while those who enjoy collaborations might stay away. It is very difficult to judge community opinion. Many editors do not get involved for whatever reason. Those that do, might not be a representative sample.

• History: There is little formalized practice of referencing previous discussions and precedents. Since "consensus can change", editors might not feel compelled to revisit the past. Old discussions are scattered all over article talk pages, and Wikipedia pages. If you were not party to the old discussion, you might have no idea that they exist, or where to find them. Old discussions get archived, but archives are rarely indexed by content.

• Focus: Because there is no commonly understood process for solving problems, the process is often unfocused. Proposals are often presented before issues are well defined with little analysis of the underlying issues. Alternatives proposals are often not examined. This often stifles creativity.

• Status quo: There has been a long understanding that guidelines are supposed to be descriptive. When the project was younger, the need for experimentation was encouraged and embraced. As it has matured, it has become very rigid. The descriptive guidelines have morphed into rigid rules as the status quo has become more entrenched. This makes it exceedingly difficult to correct problems with the status quo.

• Polarization: As issues escalate, editors with different positions get more polarized, and are thus less likely to collaborate. People who could facilitate a compromise, are less likely to get involved, and if they do get involved, they are less likely to be effective.

History

This needs to be researched and written, along with links to past an current threads that are relevant to this issue: How community decision making was first conceived, how it has evolved, previous and current attempts at reforming the process, etc...

Examples

A representative, annotated list of community decisions:

• Successful examples of community decisions
  • This list needs to be created
• Unsuccessful attempts to make community decisions
  • This list needs to be created