Topic: Wiki governance - page 2. (Read 4652 times)

I am still waiting for a reply to my earlier post on this very thread.

What a shame. Given your explicit intention to abuse power, I fear this may result in a need to fork the wiki. Too bad the Foundation seems to not be giving due diligence to its decisions.

Edit: Obviously I'm going to try to work with ripper234 in the meantime, but he has thus far proven unwilling to collaborate fairly.

I'm glad to report that I have been added as a new admin!
Thanks Lindsay, Gavin, Mark, and anyone else who helped make this happen.

I'd like to take this chance and push forward the rules I proposed.
I suppose that I will set a 2 week period to debate, edit and redefine these rules before I (and hopefully other wiki admins) start enforcing them.
How does that sound?

I honestly think that adding me as admin is a positive step, even if you can argue that the step isn't positive enough because I'm not active enough. I agree to that, and this is why I want to add more admins.


Yes of course, I'm not talking about a user's own personal page.


Not good enough. A page's history is not accessible to most visitors. It's true that they can access it if they know where to look, but the plain truth is that if a user visits an empty talk page he will not go digging through history, but rather assume that there aren't any discussions.

In any case, this is not the way things are done on Wikipedia. For reference check out the much used talk page for Bitcoin itself. Discussions are orderly archived, never "cleaned up" by editing them away.


We have different definitions of gibberish then. I won't argue which definition is correct here, that would derail the thread - but the point is that when there is a difference of opinions, someone (a majority, or an admin majority) must decide.


Repeating a claim many times does not make it true.


I disagree, but this is point is off topic anyway so let's not develop it further.

It had nothing to do with luck, and all to do with your disinterest in doing anything other than censoring important information, and not even checking the Talk page for responses.

Yes, it is. They remain archived in the Talk page history.

Yet the example you gave is actually pretty much a good example of gibberish.

Litecoin is in fact a pump and dump. Your desire to censor that does not change that.

The point I meant to make is that this forum (BitcoinTalk) is basically 99% trolls, and productive community members avoid it for that reason.
It is not overly useful for real discussions.

If you don't have the time to invest in the wiki then why are you a good candidate? Admins and moderators need to be actively involved in the community (sockpuppets or not). If you can't do that anymore, you step down (like what has happened on bitcointalk). If you can't do that since the start, then you're not a good candidate for a position of power (unless you're someone who works on the maintenance).


yes it can.

User:TradeFortress/Personal_Opinion_Goes_Here
Objective_Article_Goes_Here

Crap, I had a long answer written and my browser crashed. Here goes again.

I think that 99.9% of the disagreements should be resolved without admin powers or admins. I do think there is a place for admins and rules.


I never said I have a lot of time to invest in the wiki - actually, I wrote in the Foundation thread that the opposite is true.
I'm not sure that's relevant though.


I would love to work out our differences, but regardless I think that certain rules must be agreed upon and kept. What do you think about the rules I proposed?
My approach would always be to resolve disagreements first and not rely on the rules, but I want to do it from a place that I'll have the backing of the rules if need be.

I have tried discussing things with Luke-jr in the past, but without luck.
Please read this thread.
I am open to trying once again, but a certain set of core discussion rules must be agreed upon.



This was the state of affairs when I started looking at wiki adminship several months ago. If admins are showing more interest in the wiki now that's great news.


"Cleaning up" by deleting entire discussions is not standard wiki practice. Discussions on Wikipedia span huge volumes of text ... unlike the articles themselves, there is no problem in leaving these discussion up. This is why I suggested this core rule - discussions (that aren't complete gibrish or spam) should never be deleted / edited away


I am not claiming that we should reach Wikipedia levels of fanaticism in requiring citations everywhere.
On the other hand, the wiki can't be home to every opinion someone has on a Bitcoin related topic.

Suppose I convinced a group of my friends that satoshi has a secret backdoor through which he can make 100,000,000 bitcoin. Would it be ok to put this under "criticism" section of the main Bitcoin article: "According to some, satoshi can create 100,000,000 bitcoins by using a secret backdoor"?

It would not be ok, and this opinion would be promptly deleted.

Your accusations of Litecoin being a pump & dump are not of the same caliber of "wrongness", but it's still beyond the threshold of what I believe is valid as an opinion that should not be represented in the article. I don't want to turn this thread into a specific discussion of Litecoin, but rather stick to the general rule - when an editor's opinion is disputed, he should bring forth citations to support the claim, and sometimes (after proper discussion) he should conceded that this bit of information is too subjective/POV to be included. As I said, let's conduct the specific discussion of Litecoin on a separate thread.
[/quote]


There are other ways to resolve differences instead of waging edit war. One such way would be to open a discussion (here or on the discussion article), and truly listen to each other's opinions. Sometimes, one must concede that his opinion is not acceptable by the majority, and agree not to keep insisting to add his edits by force.


In an ideal world, the wiki should reflect "everyone's" opinions. However, "everyone" is sometimes too inclusive, and some opinions are best left out of the wiki.
I don't know of another way to resolve such conflicts except agree to abide by majority rule.
Without this basic agreement, the wiki will continue to be the battlefield for edit wars, which are just not constructive.
[/list]

I recognize this problem. It is very prevalent among wiki's all over the world. We need mediators. I'll volunteer, contact me if you want my help.

Thanks for the TL;DR, I didn't know where all of this started. The admins we have now are perfectly fine.




off-topic

Personally, I'm not happy for having to pay the "anti-spam" fee, separately, for both the English and Spanish versions if I want to be able and edit the two.

/off-topic

It seems like this whole discussion has arisen out of some people on Reddit being (rightfully) unhappy with the description of Litecoin on the Bitcoin wiki, and Ripper234 offering to prevent Luke from editing it if made admin.

But Ripper234, you haven't edited the Wiki since January other than to create the governance page you linked here. Why not try to work out your disagreement with Luke instead of asking for admin access so that you don't even need to try to work with him?  It looks like you've never even edited the page in question.

When there is a disagreement the first recourse should be to expose it and try to work it out... not to ask for admin rights and write essays on governance.   Luke is— for better or worse— one of the more active editors on the Bitcoin wiki and makes a lot of perfectly uncontroversial changes too.
 

First of all, it is not correct to say none of the current admins do anything. At least nanotube and sgornick have been proactive in managing the wiki recently.

It seems (from the Bitcoin Foundation thread) that the decision to make ripper234 an admin was done without any background check, and his self-nomination made with the intent to abuse power, an intention he has recently made explicit on reddit. Therefore, regardless of whether the Foundation is to manage the wiki or not (it currently does not), ripper234 should probably not be made an admin at this time.

Both proposals under "Future" are probably unnecessary. While certain people occasionally wage edit wars, usually to troll or censor others, the current wiki management seems to be working just fine for the most part. Perhaps a warning/ban rule should be established for the users who vandalise the wiki for trolling and/or censorship to avoid edit wars, but that seems to be the only real problem.

Regarding ripper234's proposed core rules...

• He is linking to a cleanup of the Talk page for Tonal Bitcoin, which was formerly filled with nonsensical trolling. This page was cleaned up to make room for actual discussions. Cleaning up of Talk pages is a fairly standard wiki practice. It is absurd to turn a standard practice into a rule violation.
• This is not Wikipedia. Citations may be preferrable for readers, but are not necessary ordinarily. Original research/creation is also common and necessary practice on this wiki. Points of view are subjective, and are effectively citations in and of themselves - it is absurd to censor a point of view simply because anyone disagrees with it.
• Edit wars are a symptom of trolls/censors getting away with their vandalism. Outright forbidding of them effectively only stops wiki correction (half the "edit war"), making the problem worse. If anything, the root cause should be addressed.

Finally, the wiki should not depend on this majority-rule-by-trolls forum. As long as bans are kept temporary, there shouldn't often be need of appeals; perhaps a special wiki page can be setup where banned users can post a request should there prove to be a need.

I don't think think the wiki needs "governance"— or at least the word sort of implies other people being bent to the will of others— thats not very wiki and it's not very Bitcoin either.  The Bitcoin wiki needs more community love and attention, for sure, but the best way to do that is to get more people involved. Sometimes this takes a bit of community building. Please feel free to reach out to me in cases where you think things aren't going well, and I'll gladly wade in and poke things in the right direction.

Making it work well doesn't take people with special rights— though having some active people with admin rights can sometimes be handy— especially now that the pay-for-edit stuff kills drive by spam dead. More voices trumps more special privileges.

Update 15 April 2013 - pausing the rules, they are not in effect right now. Discussion about the rules continues.
Update 13 April 2013 - the rules are now in effect. This version will be used until further notice.


Right now the wiki has no functioning admins, and is often riddled with edit wars.
MagicalTux is the de fact owner of the wiki, and sits on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation.

It has been decided that sgornick and myself will be lead admins for the wiki (the process is taking forever, but I hope we'll get there eventually). I believe sgornick is actually too busy to take an active part in wiki adminship (correct me if I'm wrong). Once this happens, there is the question of what exactly we need to do with this power.

First order of business, I would like to recruit more admins, as I also don't have a lot of time and would need considerable help running the wiki. But this is not what this thread is about.

This thread is about what the group of admins should do once it's formed.
I believe that a primary role of the admin group should be to enforce a minimal and vital set of core rules that will contribute to the general health of the wiki.

I would like the community's help in forming this core rule set. The rules in this set should be "last resort" sort of rules - it's rather bad if we ever need to invoke them, but they need to be in place nonetheless.

I have drafted an initial proposal for a way to govern the wiki, with a proposed core ruleset. Please review, edit and discuss. (I prefer discussion here rather than the wiki itself). Feel free to refine/edit my choice of words if you find more appropriate language, and of course to edit the rules themselves. Please only insert rules that you believe will actually be beneficial to the wiki, but also take care not to put in too many rules - we want the rule set to be very minimal, and very rarely enforced.