QUOTE(UserB @ Mon 14th July 2008, 9:37am)
So if you wanted to get someone without a support network (or a "cabal") desysopped, all you have to do is get 20 of your wiki-friends to show up right after the RF-deA goes live. Chances are that the drive by votes will fall in line with the majority. That abuse is my issue with it and it's a problem soley due to scaling. In a small project, your 20 wiki friends is 2 wiki friends, so it doesn't have the same stigma.
Indeed, so many human problems over recorded history have come from scaling problems, where people try to take systems (like Communism or tribalism) which work naturally in small groups like families and clans, and just scale them up to groups sizes where people are strangers, without any modification. It's disasterous. And here we see WP, repeating the same-old disasters. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif)
Argghhh. Thus, the Review. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)
And yes, the problem has come up before in human society and the solutions for it are at least a millennium old: see
Althing, for example. One needs something approximately like a proportionally representational parliament, or failing that, at least some type of liquid democracy and proxie voting so power doesn't concentrate to those non-term-limited oligarchs with too much time on their hands to game the system. It's bad enough in parliamentary democracies as is, even with term limits and no anonymity. Wiki is just that much worse, due to the anonymity, cronyism lack of a voter recall mechanism, and the ever-present possiblity of ballot box stuffing.
So it all comes back to anonymity. Solve that, and the democratic mode problems solve themselves, because they've already had a lot of work done on them, which can simply be ported/borrowed from already-successful large institutions, both public and private.
MR
This post has been edited by Milton Roe: