Thread:User talk:Tyrannis/I went to the top right corner of the page/reply (4)

A mobocracy only works if people have a modicum of self-restraint and mutual respect. When RW started it was a bunch of CP exiles who were affronted by Schlafly and his thugs' assault on reason, science and humanity; I was one of them. I wasted a lot of time on CP, both before and after I was banned, but have largely lost interest except in mocking the antics of the sysops as a bit of light relief. I am satisfied that CP is now sliding backwards into an ideological pit of ordure as a wingnut blog and becoming any sort of conservative Christian encyclopaedic resource of note is a joke. In the 5 years of RW I have become much more aware of the general level of woo and irrational belief and with similar lofty pretensions that Schlafly had with his homeschooling resource I hope that we can be something different. While CP has ossified we have grown organically, and although we get an increasing number of page-views I don't see the active userbase expanding to the same degree. While our article base increases many of the pages don't get updated as much as I would like because there are not enough editors to monitor them all. If we are to expand then it has to be on true meritocratic and democratic principles and not with a mobocracy where Joe Cool gets to call the shots over who's in the club and who's not. It has to be a place where a user's rights are inextricably linked to a user's responsibilities so that while everyone can become a janitor, if you piss in the corner then you can expect to lose those rights. One of the problems with the current system, and which was even worse with the crat system, was that sysop and crat rights were handed out on individual whims but any removal caused widespread distress. The argument that any "promotion" (a joke that should have been binned years ago) could 'be undone with a single click' is facile and as we have seen in the recent HCM it doesn't stop the action being repeated ad nauseam. There needs to be some sort of law enforcement and sysoprevoke was a useful innovation to stop someone re-sysopping a genuine troll. Restricting it to elected mods was a good idea but the problem of what to do when a mod goes "rouge" was never fully addressed. This is where a tech is important, they need to be able to re-establish at least partial status-quo, i.e. ensuring that the majority of moderators are not stymied, even if it means that one of them is. Tech rights are powerful and that is the reason I objected when Blue used her tech position to moderate. There was a clear abuse of power there as someone with both tech and mod rights is a superuser and I believe that the positions should be completely independent. I might even go as far as suggesting that techs be just that and recuse themselves from voting so that they can be seen as completely independent of site politics, much as Trent seems to be.

So the answer isn't that we should time limit votes, as that disenfranchises a lot of people and can lead to whatever group is in the majority on a particular day getting their way. As moderators are elected, then they should have the power as a group to make emergency administrative decisions, site-wide decisions regarding policy/standards can be left to the mob. However, there is a long history of mobs rigging votes so we should ensure that our franchise is fair. If you want to vote then you should be an active member of the site, that's why I proposed that eligibility should be based on the number of edits in the preceding 3-month period. If you can't be arsed to contribute then why should you get a vote which affects those who do contribute? It would also eliminate old socks in the votes which have accumulated enough edits just by sheer longevity. I am also against publishing a list of voters because that will only raise the possibility of objections that they are somebody's "known sock" when there may be lots of "unknown socks". What we need to do is to raise the bar for sock accounts so that contributions should be to mainspace articles (for example) and not userspace or WIGO/chat.

I appear to have rambled a bit and this may not be the most appropriate place but if RationalWiki can't get its house in order then the large sum which I have currently earmarked in my will for the RWF (I don't have any kids) will be redirected. Hopefully they won't be getting it anytime soon, but who knows?