Talk:Wikilitigation

just saying ...
"Wikilawyering", as a term used and understood among generally respected English language Wikipedia editors, does not mean "any reference to a policy in response to a previous policy". Its meaning is "Utilizing the rules in a manner contrary to their principles" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikilawyering). It is using the details of the written rules (any or all) to override the point of having the rules in the first place. The battle between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law is ancient and well known (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law and http://www.thecourt.ca/2010/10/14/letter-of-the-law-poised-to-undermine-equity-in-divorce-a-look-ahead-to-schreyer-v-schreyer/). Which is best is usually a matter of whose ox is getting gored. - WAS 4.250 00:02, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, OK, but I think you get where I'm trying to go. What would be a better term? --SB_Johnny talk 00:26, 28 November 2010 (UTC)


 * pettifogger? WP:PS? -- dark lama  02:22, 28 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It's also known as "gaming the system." —Caprice 00:39, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Only if it there is a working system, and most of the time it is a way to dismiss people who are pointing out that you are gaming the system. Basically, it is just another tool for one person to dominate another. This is why you hold to inalienable rights and you fight to the death to preserve them. Federal Papers 10. Ottava Rima (talk) 00:52, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It is generally easier to game (or manipulate) a dysfunctional system than a well-crafted one. Three years ago, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to three researchers who demonstrated how to design systems that were immune to gaming. —Caprice 01:17, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Where are you trying to take this, SB_Johnny?
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentially_contested_concept
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition
 * - WAS 4.250 01:38, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm not entirely sure. Generally I'm just interested in how the WP policy structure came about and how it's grown in complexity over time. I think wikilitigation and wikilawyering are likely to be at least part of why things got so complex. --SB_Johnny talk 20:40, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * From my experience clueless admins (some because they are very young, others because they are aspies) have a lot to do with it. WAS 4.250 22:12, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * One of the ironies here is that Aspies (Simon Baron-Cohen calls them Systematizers) are among the best people to hire for Operations Research — the technical discipline through which organizations develop efficient and highly functional business practices. If WP required that anyone working on policies have some minimum competence in the Fundamentals of Operations Research, it's likely that the outcome would be a lot more systematic.  —Caprice 13:43, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Moulton's Theory
In my opinion, things got complex because WP:IAR lost out to WP:HodgePodge. It's a little like that game, Nomic, which ties itself up in red tape (bureaucratic paralysis). Except that on WP, one can invoke WP:IAR to ignore whatever troublesome rule is blocking whatever you want to do.

It is well known (from Chaos Theory in Mathematics) that rule-driven systems are mathematically chaotic.

If you happen to know that, and if you don't want a chaotic system, you'll adopt a functional regulatory process that that yields a stable governance architecture.

But most people don't happen to know that, so they blithely and naively adopt a rule-driven architecture, which propels them directly to Hell (do not pass Go; do not collect $200).

People who then exploit the WP:HodgePodge of mutually inconsistent rules are gaming the system to their own advantage.

In other words, it all came about because the custodians of the sum of all human knowledge are not familiar with the subset of mathematical knowledge that would have guided them away from that Hell-bound handbasket.

Moulton (talk) 21:14, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Disagreeing with Barry is not the same thing as ignorance of Control theory. WAS 4.250 22:03, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Not quite!


 * Nomic is a pure rule-driven system. The tension that exists is between no rules (highly chaotic in one way, but actually quite bound to natural human responses, for better and for worse) and rules (rigidity leading to a different kind of instability and inability to respond to new situations, including the problems of scale if the project grows). Practical human systems are based on iteration, they do not make decisions in a single pass, unless these have been delegated to a single decider. The efficiency of the latter is balanced by the lower intelligence and knowledge of an individual.


 * It is an error to consider Wikipedia rule-based, because there are no rules, in fact, that are strictly enforced without restraint by those who have the power of action. But it looks like it is rule-based, because the actors will cite policies or guidelines as justifications, and some of the actors do believe that the rules are the source of guidance. On the other hand, deeper and clearer guidelines are avoided because it's assumed they will be abused, as they certainly will in an adhocratic system without any collective restraint. The result of that is that the same issues get "litigated" over and over again, with unpredictable results. That's highly inefficient, it burns the players out. Wikipedia got stuck in a series of contradictions that prevented normal deliberative process from being implemented. It is not like human organizations never addressed the problem before, but what is known about how to do it intelligently and fairly, developed over centuries, got tossed aside. Wikipedia was going to be better than that! But the Wikipedians did not understand what had come before, they didn't know history, so they repeated it, albeit with new faces and appearances. --Abd 23:03, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes. WAS 4.250 17:42, 30 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I couldn't fail to disagree less. —Caprice 18:12, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Underlying topic
We really should lay some foundations first!

Studying wikilitigation is likely to be unproductive without a foundation in wiki decision-making process. That process varies from wiki to wiki, and is often obscure or at least not well-explained. I've found this in many organizations, even long-term members and supporters may have no clear idea of how decisions are actually made. Further, a decision with no implementation power is not a decision at all, it is merely a proposal or idea.

This is a topic that I've written about, at great length and in great detail, from long before becoming involved in Wikipedia. It is the fundamental problem of governance and, even underneath that, the fundamental problem of how human societies make decisions, either collectively or through some defacto amalgamation or effect of individual decisions.

We could explore, and probably should explore, in appropriate resources, the general issues. However, here, we should, at least, have some clear idea of how decisions are actually made, and Wikipedia is an excellent example of what happens when the scale becomes, in certain ways, very large. So what is the decision-making mechanism on Wikipedia?

That starts with understanding what decisions are being made.
 * Text. What text is allowed to be on a page, and who decides or how is it decided?
 * Behavior. What user behaviors are allowed or disallowed, and who decides, and how is the decision implemented?
 * Membership status. If there are different classes of members, how is this determined?

The right to make decisions on a web site starts with the site owner, who sets initial rules. The owner may be an individual or an organization (that has its own internal decision-making process). Typically, though, there is one person to whom devolves fundamental authority to make decisions in particular cases. Because of scale, because of an inability to coerce volunteers, the power of this person may be limited, but that person will have, typically, the power to take any particular action practically possible. That power may be delegated, but, in practice, someone has the buttons, so to speak, to block a user, protect a page, remove content. Having this power should not be confused with a "right." This is defacto power, not divine right power, except that it is widely accepted that people who pay for a project, ab initio, have the right to control it, and that right is lost only through voluntary relinquishment of it, perhaps as a quid pro quo. For example, a site may guarantee certain users certain rights in exchange for volunteer labor. However, it is generally in the interest of site owners to restrict actual rights while allowing it to appear that there are more rights than actually exist.

Because of the huge volume of labor involved in building and maintaining a project like Wikipedia, it was necessary to attract users to do the work. At the same time, the site owners did not wish to surrender control over outcome. To resolve the natural tension in this, the appearance was set up that the "community" had control. However, a community does not have actual control unless it has mechanisms for decision-making, and it is not automatic that communities make collective decisions by any particular mechanism, and autocratic or oligarchical decision-making is quite common. Indeed, I will argue, all power is held by individuals, not by communities, as such, when push comes to shove.

There is no software mechanism on Wikipedia that amalgamates votes and blocks a user, for example, based on the vote counts. Rather, all decisions of that nature are made by a single individual. There is no rule that translates a discussion into a decision and action, except for "close" and implementation, typically by the same person, and the tradition is that a closer must have the power to act to implement. However, processes do exist for the community to "advise" a potential closer.

When we look closely, there are no decisions made through discussion, all implementations derived from discussion on Wikipedia are done by individuals who have the power to decline to act, and who sometimes have the power to act contrary to what someone else might consider the sense of the discussion or even "consensus." A person who acts like this is an "executive." The executive is not a totally free agent because the action may have consequences. If an executive alienates the users of a wiki, the executive may end up having to do all the work! Or the users may have the ability to advise another executive to remove the powers of the first.

But wikis make decision general, through the power of individuals to act. Editors, even anonymous unregistered editors with Wikipedia, create or modify text. Nobody can force them to do this, so the power has an aspect of sovereignty. That is, every user has the power to work or withhold work and, as well, to donate or withhold donations. But only rarely are the users independently organized so that this power is anything more than chaotically applied, so it is weak compared to more centralized power. If it were organized, it would be, for wikis, quite powerful. That would, however, beg the question of how this collective group makes and enforces its decisions!

What is usually considered decision-making process on Wikipedia only a rough and erratic process of developing advice from the community, or, much more often, from self-selected segments of the community. ArbComm, in this structure, is an anomaly.

I will, later, examine the adhocratic Wikipedia process in detail, looking at it for how it works and how it breaks down. --Abd 21:43, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Generally it is best to start with evidence rather than assertion. WAS 4.250 21:57, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Do you realize what happens when I do that? It's called a tome, a wall of text. Unless, of course, I have the information so tightly organized and am so sure of my conclusions that I can design a method of convincing you. Polemic. Maybe. It also takes ridiculous amounts of time to write. What I'm talking about is a field where one would think there would be massive work. One would think that basic group decision-making procedures -- techniques! -- would be taught by high school. What I found when I began working in the field is that the political scientists have generally made a series of assumptions that were highly limiting, that were not based on "engineering," i.e., on taking what is known and using it to design and test new possibilities. We'll get there, WAS. Don't worry. --Abd 23:08, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I assert that an assertion that there is no need to worry in response to "Generally it is best to start with evidence rather than assertion" definitely proves there is no reason to worry. On a serious note, I'm not suggesting that you write Principia Wikilitigation with the rigor of Principia Mathematica. WAS 4.250 17:38, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm pointing out that the full process will include necessary evidence. I don't know what evidence is needed until there some preliminary process. Alternatively, I'm FoS and when challenged, my assertions will fall apart. It works either way. In the first case, we learn, in the second, I and anyone else foolish enough to think like me have an opportunity to learn. --Abd 19:46, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * How about Principia Ataraxia? (And if you don't know what that is, don't worry about it.) —Caprice 18:11, 30 November 2010 (UTC)