Michel Bauwens : P2P Foundation

Is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia governance processes?

"The Wikipedia is often hailed as a prime example of peer production and peer governance, an example of how a community can self-govern very complex processes. Including by me.

But it is also increasingly showing the dark side and pitfalls of purely informal approaches, especially when they scale."

This is a nice summary with good links. Is it derived from somewhere else?

Indeed. It was a thread here; I'll go find the link.

Here you go. He appears to have taken the criticisms from that thread.

This exemplifies the power of bearing accurate witness to the shortcomings in Wikipedia's organizational structure and operation.

It shows that taking the time to summarise clearly and calmly can do the trick - taking that out of a thread into the blog was a sensible move.

Very interesting was the comment from Henrik. He doesn't seem to have grasped that the majority of the article was from here (and it was attributed to be fair). He doesn't like what he sees and thinks a chat with Jimbo might sort it out... but then he thinks again.

Michel Bauwens : P2P Foundation

Anthony Judge: the Wikipedia needs a process for counterclaims

"I have a very simple proposal for reforming part of the process of Wikipedia, which goes like this, and it aims to reinforce the role of experts, but not at the expense of the self-publishing by the general public.

The idea is this: as the examples of Nupedia and Citizendium have show, along with other expert-based pedia experiments, they do not advance well, because experts have little incentive as they have other sources, and they crowd out other contributions when they have power."

I'd be happy just to have a personal talk page reserved and available for the purpose of identifying errors and inconsistencies, and for suggesting improvements. It occurs to me that good faith efforts to improve the accuracy, excellence, and ethics in WP article construction ought not to be summarily silenced for no good reason.

Just on first impression, the P2P Foundation blog and wiki look like solid resources for thinking about social media.

Initial comment by Jon Awbrey on the above blog post by Michel Bauwens —

Wikipedia has the kind of culture that would summarily ban Socrates or Galileo.

Viewing that culture as a dynamic system, and watching its tragic trajectory arc so inexorably toward the fated lameness of the inevitable cul-de-sac — rhymes with cultist act — the question arises:

What are the vectors of approach and avoidance that ∑-ate to result in the ∑-ary ban of the very ∑-ers who add to the ∑ of human knowledge?

Jon Awbrey

YES.

Thank you for noticing Michel. And ps: What took you so long? (but great you finally came on board).

At the risk of appearing to pat myself on the back, I think this is a point worth emphasizing. To a significant degree, we at Wikipedia Review are as much an insider culture as Wikipedia itself. We use Wikipedia's silly acronyms (as well as making up our own), and we tend to comment in little snippets that often require significant research to track down and understand. The very nature of this BBS-style forum contributes to that, and I am as guilty as anyone here of giving in to the temptation to simply respond with a witty retort to a comment or observation.

One of my resolutions is that at least once a month I will sit down and write a brief essay, understandable by people not steeped in Wikipedia (or anti-Wikipedia) culture, that outlines a key problem or highlights an under-reported issue. I think the "breaking news" and "investigative journalism" aspects of Wikipedia Review have their place, but now that many/most people are aware of at least some of Wikipedia's shortcomings, we need to keep adding bricks to that wall.

Above all, the writing must be readable by the masses. As a colleague once taught me, "for the blind, write large". And no, that does not mean size=6.

This article is being discussed on Wikiback.

http://www.wikback.com/forums/ubbthreads.p...r=1122#Post1122

I'm not finding blogs very satisfactory as far as real dialogue goes. Partly it's my fault for being so prone to error in my typing that I have trouble working without a preview button. Plus, every blog out there seems to have a different syntax for links and formats, and some terminate your links with various degrees of extreme prejudice. But mostly I think it's the fact that even the most articulate article and commentary tends to get blogged down by the layers of peat that are laid down on top of it by succeeding bloggings.

So here's the typo-corrected version of my second post on the P2P Blog thread about Governance:

Here, we can correct our spelling errors at our lesiure.

Another Comment at the Peer-To-Peer Foundation Blog —

I hope Moulton isn't nitpicking.

Jonny

A Comment at the Peer-To-Peer Foundation Blog:

There is a fairly lively dialogue currently taking place on the parallel thread at the P2P Blog.

Here is a typo-corrected copy of my own latest comment:

John, I'm interested in your DUF. Would you consider writing a summary of the concept for our section on peer governance, see http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Governance

Yes, I've been thinking about how to do that since I got your email. Your request for "a text that is introductory, without too much terse language" is one of the things that incited me to return to some of my first articulations of these ideas, that I wrote up in a kind of "Vision Piece" in 1992 and that I later re-titled "Prospects For Inquiry Driven Systems".

By way of Coming Attractors, Strange Or Otherwise, I should explain that I think of Governance as an exercise in Cybernetic Problem-Solving or Pragmatic Design Science.

Another set of previously canned (and panned) ideas that I may try to recycle in this effort would be some of the remarks on Governance that I wrote up for the "Constitutional Convention", as it were, of Larry Sanger's Citizendium Project. I tried to incorporate everything that I had learned from the post mortem of Wikipedia, but Larry Sanger seemed to think that simply Running A Charge Through The Hulk of his Co-Foundling Frankenstein Mobster would be all it took to do the trick.

At any rate, I'll be trying to see if I can come up with something suitable for the Peer-To-Peer application.

Jon Awbrey

My experience with dysfunctional governance of online communities is that that they fail to get past the first four rungs of the Kohlberg-Gilligan Ladder. In my experience, social networking sites that fail to ascend at least to the fifth rung become mired in lamentable misadventures in self-regulation.

I spun off a separate thread for discussing Ethical Stages, Novice-Expert Shifts, and your paper on "Experiences with Civility and the Role of a Social Contract in Virtual Communities".

I also started a Governance Meta-Thread for collecting some of our old discussions on governance issues, and hopefully moving forward from there.

Jon Awbrey

Good. Perhaps we can boil down our collective observations into a WR Op-Ed piece.

A Comment On Deck at the P2P Foundation Blog: