Wikipedia Revolution

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Wikipedia Revolution

Post by Bbb23sucks » Sun Jan 08, 2023 1:18 pm

As Eric Barbour said before, a wikipedia alternative wouldn't work and would at best be merged into the larger site. But what about a wikipedia revolution? I think Wikipedia in its current form is completely broken, but I don't think the idea of a community-run encyclopedia is inherently flawed.

Let's look at example of something similar that has been far more successful than Wikipedia: open source.

First I would like to address how and why it is so much more success then Wikipedia, then how Wikipedia could be improved.

Open source has plenty of problems and controversies, but overall it does not have the systematic problems as Wikipedia. Here are some reasons why:
1. Vandalism and contributor knowledge. Since Wikipedia is open to everyone, it naturally will have vandalism. While open-source is (in-theory) open to everyone, in-practice only people who are skilled at programming can contribute. There have been instances of vandalism in open-source, but these are very very rare and have been scandals in their own.
This also prevent users who do not what they are truly doing from rising to the top.
2. Forks. In open-source anyone can fork a project if they do not like the developers of a project. While this is possible on Wikipedia, in-practice all forks either fail or are niche.
3. Bureaucracy. Since on anyone without any knowledge on a subject can contribute to Wikipedia, there is a large need to control user contributions. Which leads to large amount of rules, admins, and ultimately corruption. On open-source, since expertise presumed, there is little need for large bureaucracy or strict and overly-complicated rules.
4. Alternatives. While there are problems with open projects, you can almost always choose an alternative or create your own fork. With Wikipedia, there will always be one no matter how bad it gets. With open-source there is often a cycle where a project will build up over-time and eventually the leadership will fail. But then the project will forked and the leadership will be replace. This cycles repeats and ensures that leadership never gets too corrupt or bloated. But on Wikipedia, the leader will remain the same no matter corrupt and bloated it gets.

How to address (some of) these issues after a revolution:
1. Real identity sign-up. People would have to use their real identity to create an account, they could pseudonym for their username, but they would still have to sign-up with their real name and identity. This would eliminate nearly all troll, socks, and vandalism. And most moderation would no longer be needed. Users should also be able to list what they're knowledgable in and how they learned it (i.e. schooling, university, self-taught, etc.)
2. Direct democracy. Articles would be only created and deleted through voting. This would also apply to bans of users, which would only be discussed on a certain for bans.
3. Moderation, not Adminship. There would be a small group of moderators, but they have much more limited abilities and would only be able to block users who have only made a few edits. These would professional employed moderators rather than current RfA system.
4. Civility and drama. All non-trivial discussion of users would be banned outside of dedicated pages that would only be used in serious situations. All forms of incivility including passive ones would be banned. Note that civility =/= criticism. You can criticize someone without being incivil and vice-versa.
5. User groups. All users groups outside of user, autoconfirmed, and sysadmin would be removed. Users could still be appointed to community positions, but these would be things like leading sub-projects and work on topics they are knowledgable about, rather than things like checkusers or ArbCom.

That's it for now. Do you like my ideas? Do you have other suggestions to how Wikipedia could be fixed? Do you know how a revolution would be executed? Cheers.
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