The Consensus Manifesto
Wikipedia has a serious problem. Administrators believe they have the right to speedy delete any political userbox they disagree with, and unfortunately, they do have the power. Not only do they delete political userboxes, but they delete any userbox that is critical of their actions. This is a serious problem and it has to be stopped.
They are using a new dictate by Jimbo that makes "templates that are polemical or inflammatory" worthy of speedy deletion. This new policy is refered to as CSD T1. First of all, we as a community should not recognize Jimbo's authority to dictate commands that fly in the face of previous group decisions. Wikipedia should be run based on consensus as much as humanly possible, and one person disregarding the opinion of thousands is NOT consensus. And even Jimbo has said that this policy should be eased into slowly to keep things like this from happening.
Unfortunately, many admins have taken it upon themselves to crusade against any opinion that might be "divisive". How is displaying our opinions in userboxes divisive? We will find out each others opinions eventually while editing, so we might as well lay our hands out on the table now.
In fact, userboxes have actually united this community. These abuses of power have led to strange alliances between groups that might otherwise have no support for one another--leftists are coming to the aid of Republicans when they have their userboxes deleted; animal rights advocates are now advocating for the free speech of pro-vivisectionists; anti-war activists are on the front lines defending pro-war userboxes. The only division within this community is due to their uncontrolled deleting of our userboxes.
These concerns illustrate a larger problem wikipedia has--too much power in the hands of too few people. In order to combat this slip toward authoritarianism, these four guiding principles are proposed:
- All policy should be agreed upon by a consensus of a significant number of editors. No one, not an administrator, and not even Jimbo, should be able to make unilateral policy decisions without some strong mechanism whereby the community can easily overturn it.
- Wikipedia policy discussions need greater publicization to help keep policy debates from turning into an elitist game. If no one knows what policies are being debated, then power will be consolidated in the hands of the few editors who are in the know. This must not happen.
- Power within the community must be decentralized to help decrease the likelyhood of abuse of authority. This can be accomplished in any number of ways, including rolling adminship, increased privileges for users with good edit histories and strong impeachment procedures for cases when administators abuse their power.
- We must respect each other's differences in opinion and should work to create a truly pluralistic on-line society. This includes open discussion of opinions, which cannot be accomplished by banning "divisive" opinions from userpages. Most people are able to respect the differences of others, and the few who are not will still have to answer to the rest of the community for any disruptions they may cause.
If we work together we can make this encyclopedia and its associated community work, we just need to have faith in each other and in ourselves.
I understand that I am being quite vague with some of my proposals, because quite honestly I think we as a community need to decide what we want, and I don't think I can or should decide exactly how to run wikipedia. The one thing I am sure about is that consensus is a must. If you agree with the principles, please sign in the next section. If you have any ideas for how to actually go about implementing these priniciples into policy, add an amendment in the section below that. You may also add a new priniciple to the amendment section if you wish. If you want to discuss or debate this, feel free to do so on the talk page. Thank you all.
The Ability for Categorization
This document forgets to mention that admins still think they have a right to remove categories even though they have been struck down multiple times. [1] is a good example of Cyde. Therefore, I propose an ammendment that requires the ability to add and keep categories.
Signers
- Agree As above. Shell <e> 22:23, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
- Agree. — Nathan (talk) 02:42, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
- Agree. Sergeant Snopake 15:29, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
- Agree. ØřêōşGo Italia! 16:28, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
- Agree. KittenKlub 21:27, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
- Agree. Chili14 00:11, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
- Agree. The categories should be in the form Category:Wikipedians blah blah blah... to distinguish from other categories however --WikiSlasher 11:01, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
- Agree Dion 07:22, 9 November 2006 (UTC)