This page is very much a work in progress right now, which is to say, nobody's doing anything but fumble in the dark here, so don't trust a word of it!
As a slight refinement of the above, this page is a product of the aftermath of the May 2006 Userbox controversy. Some of us have suggested that there is some divergence of "vision" among Wikipedians regarding how the Wiki is seen as functioning. This page is a meditation on certain differences, from a one definite perspective. There's no real attempt at neutrality here, more of a mostly sympathetic description, defense, demystification, development, deconstruction, diagnosis and direction forward for an often invoked but seldom fully articulated set of ideas about Wikiculture.
In a serendipitous turn of events, after writing a few paragraphs of this would-be essay, and pushing the issue to a back-burner, I the writer became involved in a conversation on practically this very topic (as yet unnamed). I feel somewhat vindicated, at least in my claim that this really does come up a lot around here.
Amazing essay: A group is its own worst enemy. Read the part near the bottom where he talks about scaling.
1 - Non-intuitive aspects
editAs a first fumble, let's look at two mantras that get repeated often enough to merit some discussion: "Our policies are descriptive, not prescriptive" and "It's a discussion, not a vote". Both of these doctrines tend to take people by surprise, and some argue against them, especially the first one. Nevertheless, to many experienced Wikipedians they seem to be second nature, and it becomes easy to forget how non-intuitive they can seem.
"Our policies are descriptive, not prescriptive
editTwo models
editThis idea sometimes shocks people. A very intuitive model of how rules work is that someone thinks of something that might be a good idea, proposes it, starts a discussion, wins support for the idea if it's good, a poll is held, a majority supports the new rule, and it's put into practice after succeeding in its poll. That kind of process could work on a Wiki. We'll refer to it as "the prescriptive model", for short.
A different model is this ("the descriptive model"): A group of people just start working on a project, without setting any more than some very general guiding principles. As they work, they develop some habits, individually and as a group, and some habits are reinforced, because people see that they are sound practices. Eventually, someone realizes that it would be useful to write down a list of some of the good habits that have been discovered. This process continues, and the list of good habits grows, like a plant. At some point, it breaks up into many lists, documenting more and more specialized good habits. Always vigilant to avoid instruction creep, the bushes of habits are pruned regularly, and gordian knots of red tape are cut wherever possible.
Here's a comment lifted from Wikipedia talk:Process is Important that says something similar:
- Currently, there's a lot of times where people try to make it so you vote ahead of time on what to do next. You can select representatives that way, or choose between predetermined courses of action, but what you can't do is actually work out the details of what's in procedures.
- Procedures works differently. That's a case of figuring it out, applying it, seeing what goes wrong, and go back to figuring how to fix that. This should sound familiar to some people around here, especially those who write procedures for computers. Writing procedures for people is harder, because they're so unpredictable. :-)
Pitfalls of the descriptive model
editOk, so the idea has been described plenty of times. It has some pitfalls, and those should be examined.
- Scaling
- Potential for abuse
- Comfort level of people who like structure or knowing what is and isn't allowed is lower
Pitfalls of the prescriptive model
editMight as well do this, too.
Clash
editAlso to look at, is what happens when people the two visions described above - the traditional prescriptive approach versus the descriptive approach - interact in a dispute situation without realizing that they're working with different paradigms. It turns out that just being told "no, you don't understand, rules are different here," doesn't do much to relax tensions.