User:Ladsgroup/random radical ideas

My set of random and rather controversial/radical ideas I think the movement could benefit from after being part of the movement since 2006 and worn many hats. Obviously they are not well researched or polished.

Governance: WMF vs. the community: Allow veto by community consensus

The whole vector 2022 saga gave me this idea. WMF vs. the editor community are two different socio-technical systems with different focus/mandate/stakeholders and most importantly, different modes of governance. One couldn't exist without the other and prosperity of one is crucial to the success of the other. But given the different mandate and focus and different types of power in play (e.g. money), they have been showing teeth to each other since I joined the movement (2006). I know Wikimedia is not a practice of democracy (and I agree) but I got inspiration from some of the two-parliaments systems.

Here is my suggestion: If WMF wants to implement a change and they decide on it, they can go ahead. But the community should be able to veto the change by consensuses. It's a subtle but important difference from the status quo, where WMF does whatever it wants and ignores the community or they seek consensus for the change from the community (which would require roughly at least 70% of the community being in favor of the change which doesn't happen usually). If you need to veto something WMF is planning to do, you must reach the consensuses that usually is 70%, so a strong majority of the community must be against that change to be able to veto it.

Of course, all the proper etiquette of decision making applies, WMF should consult the community and listen and incorporate the feedback. Also this doesn't include changes WMF has to do for legal reasons or technical limitations, etc.

An alternative would be to require community consensuses for changes made by WMF but a much looser consensuses, e.g. simple majority would be enough.

Supporting volunteers via a marketplace of transparent paid editing

Imagine something like Patreon but for editors who need financial support. I think Wikipedia:Reward board should be made more prominent and more structured, people should pool their rewards, etc. We should have a bazaar of all sorts of non-COI paid editing, that way we can connect two major groups of people, people who have some disposable income and care about free knowledge vs large pool of young passionate volunteers with some free time who could use some extra bucks and it'll be win-win-win situation.

Make a Yellow-page Wiki

Volunteers are spending a lot of time cleaning up spam and promotional content, this is draining, really really draining. I gave up deleting items in Wikidata after a couple months. The problem will exist forever. Partially we should improve our tooling (and I have lots of ideas on that e.g. deploying StopForumSpam) but one easy way to channel this amount of promotional content to somewhere else is to have a yellow-pages wiki or at least a wiki with some looser COI and notability criteria. This won't fix the problem for good but reduces our volunteers workload.

Partnership with educational youtube channels

People are loosing their attention span and I think this is hurting Wikipedia. I can't really read many articles in depth anymore and stop at reading a couple of sentences and then glossing over images and then searching in youtube about educational videos in the same topic. One way to tackle this problem is to actually recognize some of really good channels and then link to them prominently at the bottom of the page, e.g. External links but with dedicated subsection. It can be anything from MIT OCW to "DW Planet A" to "Real Engineering" to Vox explained, to highly recognized conference presentations such as "what the heck is event loop" etc. We could also sometimes get video donation from them and upload them directly and use them in the articles. That could be really awesome if you go to an article and there is a video you can click on and it would explain to you the concept in a well prepared video.

Celebrities for fundraising

This is self-explanatory. It's a bit tricky but with celebrities with good standing, we could benefit a lot. They could use their voice to clear up some misconceptions, etc.

Board election: To gain the board majority, you must make the largest and most diverse possible pool of people happy

It's based on Selectorate theory (outlined in The Dictator's Handbook and lots of other places). I explained this in detail in m:Special:Diff/21406755. Basically in order to make governance more democratic, you need to maximize the minimum number of people the person in power needs to keep happy to stay in power (I know it's complex, a chapter of the books is just explaining this concept). For example, in a truly democratic society, you need to keep half of the adults in a country happy to stay in power. In UK, the parliamentary governance, it's 1/4th of adults (to vote for your party and get enough MPs elected). And if you need to make only five members of the board happy to stay as CEO, you (consciously or unconsciously) just focus on keeping them happy. But if the community selected seats get a bigger number and reach majority, the CEO needs to keep at least half of the community (in order of thousands) happy to stay in position. It doesn't mean if we go on the "only 5 people happy" path, these people will be evil or corrupt. It'll be just a different form of governance with different focus.

An ideal solution would be something along the lines of three-four candidates from the community votes, one-two from votes by staff/ICs (this is common in many European countries), three from affiliates, three-four appointed by the board, etc.. The exact number doesn't matter much, the important thing is that none should be able to reach majority on their own or get close to it.