Saturday, September 08, 2007

Devolving power

One of Wikipedia's major problems today is the role of administrator. Administrators have substantially more power than non-administrators; they and only they get to decide what stays and what goes, and for that matter who stays and who goes. Although Jimbo has long tried to impose the notion that "administrators are no big deal", the simple fact is that being an administrator is a big deal and people will go to considerable lengths to gain that power.

Devolving power from administrators seems an obvious thing to do. The problem is finding ways to diffuse the power currently held by administrators and devolve it into the community without creating a lot of bureaucracy. The community already votes on deletions, and it's quite obvious that this isn't working too terribly well. Voting on blocks is even more problematic, because a block decision amounts practically to a trial, and really trials by popular vote are a really bad idea.

Deletion is especially easy to devolve, so easy in fact that there's been a proposal to do it since October 2003. The so-called "pure wiki deletion system" (which is labeled on the English Wikipedia as a "rejected policy") effectively devolves the deletion decision away from administrators by allowing any editors to delete any article. It also resolves one of my personal gripes with deletion on Wikipedia: the fact that most editors cannot retrieve deleted articles, even when those articles have been deleted for being "nonnotable". Right now, deletion on Wikipedia is used for two totally different purposes: one is to remove articles deemed "unworthy of inclusion in the encyclopedia", and the other is to remove content which is legally, morally, or ethically problematic. The problem with using the same mechanism for both is that the first leaves too few people with the ability to see the "unworthy" article, while the second leaves the dangerous content where too many can see it -- any of 1300+ admins, who we really have no reason to trust because the selection process does a piss-poor job of screening for trustworthiness.

The pure wiki deletion system allows for "ordinary" deletions to be made, and reversed, by anyone; anyone can also come along, examine the prior content, and either reuse it in some other article (or for some other purpose entirely), restore any prior version of the article, or write a better version. The current practice loses the history, which encourages people to repeat the same mistakes that came before. "Extraordinary" deletions, the sort that are required by copyright, libel, or other legal, moral, or ethical standards, would be exercised by a much smaller, more carefully chosen group with a deletion power similar to the current badly-named "oversight" privilege. I don't see any way around that power being held by a small group; the risk of abuse is too high, as we already well know. Devolving this power is one of the ones I haven't figured out how to deal with.... fundamentally, some things are going to have to be held only by a limited number of people; the trick becomes choosing those people wisely, something which the Wikipedia community has not shown a great deal of capability of to date.

So the real question is, why hasn't the pure wiki deletion system been implemented? It's not technically very challenging; I suspect I could make the necessary code changes in a few days, and someone more familiar with the MediaWiki codebase could probably do it faster than that. No, the problem here is that it devolves power from those who have it. And since the people who would be losing the power are the people who at least have a large say in whether or not they will lose that power, they naturally resist it. Entrenchment's a bitch, isn't it?

So, while it's certainly quite possible to think of ways to make Wikipedia run better or more reasonably, there's no hope of getting them implemented, precisely because the people who stand to lose the most through such changes are in a position to prevent them from happening. There is no leadership, and in fact a very strong community attitude against having leaders of any sort, to push any real efforts at reform.

So at this point I don't have much hope that any of my proposals, suggestions, or ideas will ever see the light of day on Wikipedia, but I do hope that they will inform the people who build the next online encyclopedia project -- the one that will eventually replace Wikipedia, so that they at least do not mindlessly repeat the same mistakes that Wikipedia made.

10 comments:

  1. If every editor had the ability to do a normal deletion, we'd have a nightmare of random vandalism deletions, and good, but semi obscure articles being deleted, but nobody knowing.

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  2. Fundamentally, 'Pure Wiki Deletion' is simply a little visual sugar that makes empty articles show up as 'dead' links and thus as non-existent articles. It doesn't really change anything significant.

    After that change, all that's needed to 'delete' an article is to blank it.

    Wikipedia already gives any random idiot the ability to blank any unprotected article, which is 99.9% of them. We seem to handle the blanking issue well enough already.

    If necessary, one can set up a bot to monitor page blankings - in fact, I'm pretty sure that several of the anti-vandalbots out there already do that.

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  3. I don't think it has been implemented because of the AfD system. The project favors one area for deciding if the article stays or goes rather than on-the-fly decisions that can be made by one editor and are maintained by changing consensus. I think it would be interesting to try out and I think the best option would make blanked pages show up as dead links. By doing this you can keep both systems and stop recreation if you want.

    But, I completely agree with allowing every user to see deleted content unless deleted for legal reasons. In fact, as an admin, it would save me from requests to get that material for other users.

    I don't necessarily think administrators have too much power. They have two types of power. One is the organic power that came from being a long time contributor whether admin or not. The tools, I don't think, really gave me much power because I always had to limit myself and use them only in clear situations not involving myself. I couldn't even use them to get rid of obviously problematic users. I suppose the problem is that some admins don't act with restraint.

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  4. "Category:Wikipedia administrators who will provide copies of deleted articles" is linked from "Wikipedia:Why was my page deleted?", which in turn is linked from "MediaWiki:Recreate-deleted-warn". I get requests all the time. But yes, I generally agree that it's too difficult to get access to the harmless deleted material. I foresee another protection regime similar to some permanent move-protections coming with a pure wiki deletion system.

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  5. The conspiracy theory that it's been blocked because it devolves power is cute, but really it *is* just because I haven't gotten round to it, and neither has anyone else. :)

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  6. Jimbo has long tried to impose the notion that "administrators are no big deal", the simple fact is that being an administrator is a big deal and people will go to considerable lengths to gain that power.

    Devolving power from administrators seems an obvious thing to do. The problem is finding ways to diffuse the power currently held by administrators and devolve it into the community without creating a lot of bureaucracy.

    The cure for that is more administrators. I'm amazed everyday by the great editors I see with 10K+ edits who aren't administrators.

    Deletion is especially easy to devolve...

    I don't think the deletion process is at all important, nor does it need to be re-designed. see here

    I don't see any way around that power being held by a small group; the risk of abuse is too high, as we already well know. Devolving this power is one of the ones I haven't figured out how to deal with.... fundamentally, some things are going to have to be held only by a limited number of people; the trick becomes choosing those people wisely, something which the Wikipedia community has not shown a great deal of capability of to date.

    The answer here is culture. Wikipedia has to gradually shift its powerbase to a merit based system, or it will fail. The people who are motivated and capable of creating durable content have to be placed into leadership positions, or the project won't meet its goals. (just my opinion here) There is a shockingly high percentage of people who live for wikipedia but don't actually create any content - they are here for the wrong reasons and shouldn't be in positions of leadership. The project needs a culture, and thereby leadership, that is aligned with its stated goals.

    And since the people who would be losing the power are the people who at least have a large say in whether or not they will lose that power, they naturally resist it. Entrenchment's a bitch, isn't it?

    Simple answer: publish or perish. (yeh, I know, people scoff at this thought, but there happens to be a reason for it)

    There is no leadership, and in fact a very strong community attitude against having leaders of any sort, to push any real efforts at reform.

    There is ample and effective leadership potential that is available for the asking, but mostly untapped. If you doubt this, go try to fuck with Mikka or Giano ;)

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  7. I hope the next online encyclopedia project makes the following changes:

    1. Rather than deleting "non-notable" articles, keep rankings based on searches of the number of views of different articles, and weight things like "find random article" results by these weightings.

    2. When an article becomes the object of edit warring, have a low hurdle for branching the article into multiple versions, with each competing faction having essentially complete control over its version and with each version carrying a template with links to other versions. Then let readers vote on such things as accuracy and writing quality to govern which version will be the first displayed on a search. Wouldn't it be fun to see neo-Nazis striving to create a believable, well-written article on World War II? Possibly one thing to prevent control over is disputes of factual claims.

    I suspect that these two changes alone would put a damper on half or more of the Wikidrama that goes on.

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  8. Kelly, there is always going to be power structures in any group. Simple ''Devolving'' isn't the answer, nor will it fix anything. If you ''devolve'' power it will just manifest itself in a different way.

    The people you want at the top are the people who've created this project. These people will view the project as their ''baby'' and will protect it with their lives.

    Instead, we have hoards of fat assholes lying around socalizing all day on irc and occasionally running a category churning bot, not having created any content in recent history. When people like this get into positions of power they just end up playing their petty enemies vs. allies games, regardless of the cost to the project.

    Take two people of identical intelligence, personality and temperament. One becomes an admin based on her merit as an encyclopedia writer, the is just appointed an administrator. They will make different decisions in the course of their admin work. Sorry, thats just the way it is.

    You want good leadership for an encyclopedia project? Tap the best encyclopedia writers. Make it merit based, and you'll get people who create, get things done and put the project ahead of themselves.

    The neat thing is that once power starts to shift like this, certain people will leave. Shift the power in the right direction, and you will get rid of the right people.

    It really is a matter of ethos, or group culture as mentioned above. Everything will follow from that. If we continue to accept influence from people who are more interested in their reputations, or taking down their enemies than the well being of the project, then it won't succeed.

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  9. Actually a pure wiki deletion system could be easily implemented right now. Just move 'deleted' pages to a designated page (say Wikipedia:Deleted pages/[name]), and set up a bot to listen on the IRC live changes, and delete redirects after such moves. (On the long term, you can change the code so that they don't appear on the first place.) Exclude this pages from google and from internal search.

    This has the big advantage that you can overwrite the deleted article while seeking consensus, so if people think the article could be kept if it would be written better, you can improve it without having to undelete first.

    It would also be fully transparent: the bot could put a link into the delete summary, and the page and its history would be visible for anyone. (Of course, you would still use hard delete for copyvio, spam, libel etc.)

    The only drawback I see is that delete warring would fuck up page history even more than in the blanking version (two lines for every revert instead of one), but such wars could be handled by move protecting the page. (Besides, a way to hide irrelevant entries like vandalism from the page history will be neccessary sooner or later, pure wiki deletion or not.)

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  10. Kelly

    Do you really think devolving deletion power would do much to curtail the power of Admins? Realistically, deletion and undeletion is the least authoritative of our three "powers" - both blocking/unblocking and protecting/unprotecting give admins far more power that deleting/undeleting, as far as I can see.

    Is this really off-base? Does the ability to delete/undelete pages really give admins any advantage?

    For what its worth, I agree with you that power needs to be more distributed - I for one feel this probably means we just need a large bump in the number of admins.

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