Wikipedia:Decision Making Process
Note: This article should be developed collaboratively, following loosely the NPOV guidelines when dealing with opinions, as an analysis of our options.
For Wikipedia to be able to scale, it is agreed upon by many of its users that the project needs a decision making process to agree on those policies that are consistently enforced. Such a process could also be used to interpret the policies in individual cases.
The following different types of process have been suggested:
Voting
Voting can be implemented in various different ways. Issues and persons can be voted on. The following is a proposal to vote on specific issues, both policies and their individual application.
Users can create two types of polls, inquiry polls (non binding) and policy polls (binding, with enforcement). Only a smaller group of users (still larger than the current admin group) can create policy polls, but the same group of users (e.g. everyone with >=n contributions) can vote in both types of polls. Policy polls can contain only specific types of options: ban user X, delete page Y, etc., but still follow the same discussion/voting principle.
Polls get their own namespace, and on the page where the poll is, users can also provide arguments for or against the different options. So I would go to Poll:Ban Lir and could see the different opinions and vote on them. The poll page might look like this:
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Lir has made many silly contributions and can't be trusted. --Eloquence 15:19 Nov 15, 2002 (UTC) |
Lir has made xx valuable contributions and is trying to improve her behavior. --Foo Bar, 21 Nov 2002 |
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Inquiry polls would allow the options to be defined freely and primarily be used to gather opinions in less extreme conflicts among reasonable persons. As voting styles, both first-past-the-post (winner takes all) and preferential voting are reasonably simple and should be supported, policy polls work better with fpp voting (clearly distinct options).
Recently added polls would be listed on a separate page like Recent_changes. The poll would be closed after a given timespan, defined by the person who creates it. For policy polls, depending on the type of action, we could set different threshold for whether we want to take it, e.g. banning an anon user should be easier than banning a signed in user. Minimum number of votes may be necessary, but not too high.
Possible problems: - we need to develop effective ways to deal with vote flooding in the long term (the system can be designed to repel basic attacks)