User talk:Larry Sanger/Nine Theses/Archive 4

this ain't even what theses are~

a thesis is an academic work with its own documentation and sourcing used to prove any given point, or the same thing but with the purpose of responding to another thesis. those are requests. petitions if you're feeling generous, and demands if you're the kind of person who thinks big brother is a role model

if you wanna argue that those are called theses because martin luther called his requests theses, uh... go ahead, i guess, but you're gonna have to talk it up with the wiktionary folk, because the definition ain't there at the moment

okay that's the most obvious one done yay let's go to the further requests

let's go to the further requests

haters will say that i repeated "let's go to the further requests"

• "wikipedia should join the encyclosphere": uh... what even is the encyclosphere? the info we have seems to only say it's "like wikipedia but with a blockchain bro", which is at best like page histories but they chug energy like an entire city
• "implement term limits": what're we gonna gain out of admins being on a timer? do you understand that this requires an extremely steady influx of people qualified to be more admins? more importantly...
• "require yearly administrator performance reviews": nah, we do that all the time. if an admin's stinking up the joint, people say so. maybe in warnings, maybe in discussions, maybe even in some flavor of rfda. also, ai being used to make administrative decisions is the literal exact opposite of what people in those administrative positions should do if they want to keep existing, i thought you'd know that, larry
• "partner with an independent organization to handle appeals": won't be necessary due to one of the requests, but even if that request is retracted, the current rules require that different admins handle repeated appeals, so wp's way ahead of you. there's also a 70% chance you think ai would be qualified for this, and an llm never telling you "no" doesn't mean it'll magically learn to not do what's necessary to appease other "users" over actually fulfilling its designated purpose
  • on a related note, and something that will be very useful to keep in mind here...
    A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
    THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

• "end ip editing": instead of limiting the arguments to what wikipedia does, i'll instead point to another website... rule34.xxx. yeah, this whole fiasco's already gone by in a porn imageboard where some degenerates think adding a text wall to the corner of an image counts as effort if they add glowy filters and call it a "manip" (and some don't even have that decency, just slapping a tagme on it and calling it a day). anyway, it did away with anonymous commenting a while ago, all that came (laugh) out of it was a mix of nothing good and nothing at all, and pretty much no one actually liked the changes. if someone's just going in for one edit (or one spicy jerk in r34's case), they'll have created an entire account just for a single purpose, which will then likely never see the light of day again. it's too much effort to gatekeep people who could add good info to articles, and not efficient enough for gatekeeping vandals since socking is a thing that exists. also, what did you mean by "insiders"? what would an "insider" be in wp's context, what would they gain out of logged out editing that they wouldn't gain out of being admins (or whatever), and what about checkusers? you know vpns are usually not allowed, right?
• "replace or augment the edit counter with work assessments": what? no, really, what? is this meant to imply that you think people think bigger numbers mean someone is inherently considered morer gooderer at the wikipedias? nah, someone with 7k edits across 3 years can prove themself to be an incompetent clown who spends most of their time bludgeoning rfd, like that cogsan guy (he's a wonk, i hate him). treating editing like a mobile game where users are drip fed dopamine is how you make a subreddit, not how you encourage people to actually improve stuff. ai is at least uniquely good at this, so this is the one scenario where it would unambiguously help... to create a cesspit
• "end or loosen restrictions on 'meatpuppetry'": no ulterior motives detected, nosiree. i muck around in at least one discord server where stuff related to editing is discussed, but it never comes down to "hey, make this edit for me" or "hey, join me in this". there's a big difference towards suggesting or discussing edits among a small group, and recruiting people to fabricate support
• "label pages that are not appropriate for people under 13": good, now go define that, how it'll be implemented, and whether or not it'll be used to gatekeep people from specific articles. what if a kid's gotta learn about the piss producer or the shit spawner, but parental control decides that that warrants the exterminatus? are you willing to use this to censor wikipedia? we have wp:notcensored to detail exactly why that's a bad idea, and to provide examples of how someone can do it themselves
• "allow memorial articles about elders and deceased friends and family": per death and accounting for how it's no longer 2022, that would mean over 110 billion usually unsourced stubs about randos that anyone could then edit. it also conflates noteworthiness with notability, dilutes noteworthiness, and a third thing
• "embrace inclusionism": not gonna happen with what's going on just below

phew, what a doozy. off to the meat of the requests

request 1: "end decision-making by 'consensus'"

yeah, i hate when people agree on stuff, we should just... uh... you're aware that the alternative(s) you suggested are different flavors of consensus, right? are you aware that consensus is how reality itself is determined? languages, facts, nomenclature, it all comes down to people describing them and other people going "yeah that sounds about right", hopefully after cross-referencing it with the evidence they can scrounge up. i'll get back to this later :)

request 2: "enable competing articles"

let's say for the sake of argument that i believe the earth is flat. i believe it's a flat, vaguely cylindrical disk i believe gravity isn't real. i believe there's a wall of ice. i believe the earth and sun are rapidly going up in such a way that it creates an effect similar to gravity. i don't believe flights that would make sense on a spherical-ish earth but not a flat one actually exist. i don't believe climate change is real, because it being real would imply that the ice wall would melt. i fail to see how a flat plane going up ad infinitum really really fast would make things fall off, like a giant wall of easily breakable (and/or melting) ice. i fail to see how someone digging really deep wouldn't just fall into space. by this logic, if i believe in those strongly enough, my word is required to be given equal weight to things that prove it false, be it in the same article, or in a separate one that acts as an echo chamber where conflicting beliefs are welcomed. i'll get back to this later :)

and by "later" i mean "now", because the gasp system (uh huh yeah the image was made by a friend, i'm loving all the no sauce you provided beyond "own work", and the suspiciously urinesque tone and choppy editing) pretty accurately exposes your actual intent: you want your word to be treated as objective truth, regardless of following the truth where it goes. let's go through the system

• "globalist": if you want to be pedantic, you're correct by a technicality, and even then, only kind of correct. western views are only prioritized because most editors are western. this kink is being ironed out via projects like women in red and certain editathons, don't worry. we just need the kurdistani folk to take a chill pill tbh
• "academic": aah i can't believe this wiki uses academic sources aah my eyes are burning those claims requiring credit is bad actually aaaaa you haven't given a reason to believe that people knowledgeable about any given topic, who have studied that topic and submit their theses (as in actual theses) are not to be trusted as sources over some rando on youtube going "well i have a different opinion", and your proposed solutions will lead to that if implemented
• "secular" (with a suspiciously cross-shaped icon): yeah, we should treat one specific religion as the objective truth and adapt to it. now pick of the litter, and be wary that "christianity" is not a valid option. what'll it be? any one flavor of protestantism, any one flavor of orthodoxy, pastafarianism, any one flavor of shintoism, any one flavor of buddhism, any one flavor of taoism, any one flavor of shamanism, any one indian religion, any one indian religion, helixism, any one flavor of berber, any one flavor of egyptian lore, any one flavor of ancient roman lore, any one flavor of ancient greek lore, any one flavor of old norse lore, any one flavor of ai mysticism, any one mesopotamian religion, i bet you haven't realized that the two only religions that haven't been preceded by the disambiguators "any one" or "any one flavor of" have been satiritcal religions based on memes, any one flavor of scientology, any one ufo religion, any one flavor of comfa, any one flavor of- oh, you meant religions should be given equal weight to beliefs contrary to or independent of them? good, then that only balloons the weight of nearly every article by detailing all of their available stances regarding what their material covers (and usually stuff it doesn't). so something like "grobletombus marble eyes died by ramming into a particularly spiky wall" would become "some say grobletombus rammed into a particularly spiky wall. atheists say he died there, evangelists say his soul moved straight to the afterlife, shintoists say he possessed the wall, the gospel of prosperity says he was a broke ass mf, helixists asked the fossil, scientologists say he might not have rammed into the wall at all...", so on and so forth. it doesn't account for how relevant they actually are to any given thing, and contrary to what i've seen said on the bird app, only shoves them in people's faces without actually adding anything to the conversation. this alone should be enough to prove that your entire argument borders on a belief system not unlike that of a child who has always been met with interest from its parents and isn't used to others having their own lives. not like we'll see more proof of that anyway
• "progressive": this is one of those times where i have to wonder if you ever evaluate your own words. you're saying in one breath that we should be more inclusive... and in the next that we should be less. when i suggest not seriously considering this, it's not because i personally disagree with your ideologies, it's because they contradict themselves in ways so obvious i'm genuinely surprised you don't notice them, even when you actually do. your opinion isn't any more relevant than that of someone who believes that trans rights are human rights, but it is less relevant than that of one who holds any given belief and has reliable source to back it up (which is a deliberately misleading argument on my part, i'll let you figure out how, though i'll explain in an invisible comment, here i go!!), and its relevance is moot if consensus decides that doing something else would be better

as for the descriptions on the neutrality regarding how the christian sky daddy is described... eh, it's kind of incoherent, but "god" being a common noun is perfectly okay when it's not referring to that gary stu. it also ignores that notability is independent of time, or else we'd still believe in geocentrism. moving on

as for the proposed solutions, here are some assorted notes:

• draftspace is already used, not sure why you want it to be "implemented". i have my personal peeves with people who skip that step, but not really enough so to argue that afc should be required
• automatic moving doesn't work either, for the same reasons as giving ai administrative roles. the fact that this entire proposal boils down to "eh idk you figure this one out yourselves" is what i'll treat as proof that you haven't thought this over either. the actual criteria you proposed would just enable cruft if it's got enough padding, and the minimum amount of sources generally accepted for an article is already 3
• the creator determining who works on the article fails on two main ways
  • the creator might go mia. if someone makes an account just for getting one article into wp and then dips, who will be allowed to edit?
    • if other people can influence that decision, it's effectively worthless, and just means everyone can edit everything
  • that's exactly how you make echo chambers. if you go "i have a sign that forbids people i don't like from editing my article", you'll only really end up looking like an elementary school bully, and "your" article will look like the average ultrakill video (minus the part where it's actually about the best game probably ever). it's why we have wp:own, and it's why i said the inclusivity argument wouldn't work with those requests
• competing articles having different frameworks is just a pile of unnecessary effort, even for people in favor of implementing it, let's not do that. hell, it would even step on wikipedia's format as an encyclopedia. if one article uses the current standard form, but another is an essay on what the creator likes, and then another is just someone's homework, even readers will just be confused with how much stuff they have to juggle around just to understand anything
• same for arbcom respecting those frameworks. do you know how hard it'll be to keep all of them in mind? having like 300 different rulesets for stuff would drag stuff out and drain editors of their brain juices
• rating for wikipedia bad. make article with big good number look alway good. make article with big bad number look alway bad. easy to bot big number. use many bot, make article look good or bad
• human not good at rating. if no like article topic, say article bad. if like article topic, say article good. article no need be good or bad. ultrakill good, but ultrakill article bad, so what vote?
• where vote article okay? some article only okay. not bad. not good. if vote good or bad, am lying. if no vote, rating system think me not interested, then think many people not interested
  • star system better for make okay vote, but reader see under 4.5 star and think article bad, when article just okay
• article get updated, but rating stay? article that was bad become good, but still have bad number. also many many edit. article get updated lots
  • article get updated, and rating not stay? rating not stick for long, unless edit become slow. edit no become slow. editor make many typo, add lots of info. event article need keep up with event
• ai rating for wikipedia bad. make ai think for reader. reader find good article but ai say bad? article now bad. reader not get more smart
  • ai rating need reader be smart. ai say "article good for make subject look good" but reader not read past "article good"? reader think article good. if reader smart, just read article
• "application to search results and hyperlinking"... uh... those are just random keywords? we have search results and we have hyperlinks? look, i'm gonna make this entire sentence a link to an article
• the advantages proposed sounds almost like it's been written by ai, let's just move on from how not correct it all is

phew, that's another doozy, and we're only 25% of the way through

request 3: "abolish source blacklists"

no

request 4: "revive the original neutrality policy"

this requires ignoring that maybe things have to adapt to the times. you know, maybe the original policy wasn't cutting it, so changes had to be made. the best arguments presented here rely on work being done in other areas being an inevitability, which is not the case. some topics are uninteresting, some topics are niche, some topics are divisive, and some topics just don't have too much coverage for whatever reason (where are my hero of law reviews, come on!!), and that's not something we can magically fix

hey it's gasp again

this whole section also conflates being neutral with giving everything equal weight. nah. some sources can be wrong. some sources can be outed as quacks. hugh fudenberg said he could cure autism with his bone marrow, actual doctors said he was insane. we don't need to pretend they have equal claim to the intricacies of autism, and we don't need to avoid saying that there's consensus among reliable sources that hugh was insane a and b disagreeing doesn't necessarily mean we can't say either side is wrong

the following arguments about the reliable source policy rely almost entirely on you really wanting sources that have been deemed unreliable for reasons. i'm not saying this points to a conflict of interest with you, but i am saying it can be very easily used by people with conflicts of interest. same goes for the "pejoratives", which... why would you be worried about sources being referred to as racist? if you expect people to be more careful with how they toss those words around, that's outside of wp's scope, and not really the kind of thing anyone can control in the first place. it's also vague about whether this only applies to mainspace or also to discussions, but the implication seems to be that it applies to discussions with relatively little concern for mainspace

i'll note that, in this section, you actually found out that requests 2 and 4 contradict each other, which implies some level of hindsight. that said, the arguments against that being the case don't work since they're not arguments against it, so meh

as a sidenote, i'll note that this whole thing has been using inconsistent quotation marks. some curly, some not curly... this isn't consequential unless it goes to mainspace (in which case mos:curly applies), but it annoys me specifically

request 5: "repeal 'ignore all rules'"

no. rules aren't one size fits all, and we don't need to make that the case. it's an ongoing problem with religions, for example. you know people have died over faith healing, right?

if you want to argue that iar is misused, that's fine, but that's more within the purview of skill issues, not anything policy can do without making iar half a yaoi fanfic long, which editors have agreed just dilutes the message

saying that "nobody is above the law" requires that the law be above them. if the law is above the people, what are the people even doing? if they're carrying the law, the law is kind of useless tbh. if the law is dragging them around, the people are kind of useless tbh. as is, it's definitely closer to the former, as laws can't exist without beings to enact them, but in practice, laws are actually a little more powerful because they're not absolute, as they then function as a guideline of what we should probably not waste our time thinking about. putting it unambiguously above them doesn't do much besides depriving people of individuality, doesn't actually encourage constructive work, and won't do anything to stop deliberate or accidental misuse or misinterpretation of rules, vandalism, and people arguing that the laws need updating. wanting laws to govern instead of guide almost sounds like something out of a religion, but who am i to say that, besides someone who grew up in a religious household and learned that dogma doesn't hold a candle to the overwhelming power of a ps2

request 6: dox people

no wait, that's not what it says, whoops. it's actually

request 6: dox people, but spicy

this entire argument misinterprets pretty much everything. let's just... do the listy thing

• groups of people acting as leaders: nah. despite what it might seem like from the outside, admins and other such people rarely lead. they absolutely don't inherently lead anything on their own. an admin could lead a project just as easily as a bureaucrat, who could do it just as easily as a checkuser, who could do it just as easily as some guy who joined last week. that is to say, not very easily, as nothing here keeps people from going their own ways. the people you seem to be appointing as "leaders" are more "moderators" than anything (which is really funny because they're not even actually moderators. there's a difference between mods and admins, and this is a good example of it~)
• arbcom acting as leaders: also nah. functionally, their main role is closing discussions, and their participation in them aside from that isn't much different from that of any other editor or admin. hell, they can even be mistaken, and you don't want a leader to take a mistake too far~
• bureaucrats acting as leaders: also also nah. if anything, "bureaucrat" effectively means "admin admin". gonna get into it in like 2 lines
• checkusers acting as leaders: what
• admins acting as leaders: also also also nah. admins don't lead. they administrate, it's in the name!! if things need administration, they'll do that. if things don't need administration, they won't administrate. goonmode joining and immediately spamming "you smell of poo poo pee pee" in random articles is cause for administrative attention (blocking, usually), but an inexperienced editor going to the teahouse and asking how to cite journals isn't. this also isn't to say that that's all admins (and by extension, bureaucrats) do. an admin could answer the inexperienced editor's question, even though that's not an administrative action, because an editor is an editor

finally, and i've been wanting to say this since i started writing about this section... wanting less anonymity, in this age of the internet, is an extremely good way to out you as either someone who's somehow missed every single personal data fiasco for the past three silksong development periods (that is to say, about 18 years), or actively wants to use that personal data. considering that you confirm it's the latter, i'll have to say this in no uncertain terms and use bigger text for the second time in this comically long comment...

you'll be putting people in danger

i don't just mean legal consequences, i mean real-life ones. when i said this was one of the funniest things i'd seen here, i was employing a literary trick known as "lying". this is so seriously tone-deaf that i'm 99% sure you didn't have anyone to proofread this. some people are very hateful, and very willing to throw bricks to or at people they don't. or, you know, shoot them with a gun. you might think this is a ludicrous proposition, but if you remember what happened to john f. kennedy (spoilers: he died), you know no one is safe, and i hope you can then figure out that stripping the layer of anonymity wikipedia has will only make that worse. even a 0.000000001% in the chance of them getting shanked in the streets for blocking a vandal per whatever timeframe you want to name is too high a risk

maybe a little less importantly, what's so bad about a little bit of silliness or humor? jay's real name might not be jay, for example, but that doesn't mean he's an inherently worse editor as a result. hell, if my username was adriano putaporra (that's not actually my name, but just pretend it is), it wouldn't make me an inherently better editor. this one really just comes off as you hating fun, and also comically unaware of how modern society works

you might think this isn't doxing because it requires their consent, and oppose the act of doxing on the basis that it's dangerous, but this also meets its own problems

• is it really "consent" if the choice is "gib pewsonal info or leave"?
• what makes doxing dangerous that your proposed acts would avert?
• didn't you vouch for actually properly doxing specific editors earlier this year?

also, i'll just note that one of your proposed solutions is very literally just paid editing. don't do that, i'll detail why later

request 7: "let the public rate articles"

uh... refer to the section in request 2 written in comic sans to see why that's a bad idea on paper and a worse idea in execution. you'll just recreate reddit, where articles people like will be deemed good, and articles people don't like will be deemed bad, in a system very open to rushed or flawed judgements, in a context where things will get updated all the time. the social media platforms you presented as examples of stuff that uses ratings, but here's the difference: those are social media platforms, this is an encyclopedia. this isn't like content assessment, where people analyze articles, cross-reference stuff with its sources, grade it accordingly, and then potentially ask for reassessment if the article or current standards change. if it wore its skin, you could get random albums no one's heard of rated as "good" or "featured" articles because a bunch of people like the albums, regardless of their articles' quality

also, refer to the comic sans section again for why using ai for this is an extremely bad idea. might as well have it regurgitate the article at you like a bird at this rate, if you're trusting a program over your own intuition

relying on a decentralized (whatever that means) one person one vote (whatever that means in the context of the internet) system also falls flat when socking is involved, and honestly seems more like a cryptobro wanting blockchains on everything, even when there are already better equivalents (in this case, diffs). it's too much effort for something that's a little too easy to manipulate

request 8: "end indefinite blocking"

nah, we got systems to handle indefs. an editor who believes they've ironed out the kinks that led to a previous block can make an unblock request. if they've had talk page access revoked, they can use the unblock ticket request system. if the reviewing admin(s) believe they have, they'll unblock them. otherwise, they'll stay blocked you even acknowledge that blocking people like trolls is a good idea, but seem to fail to acknowledge that forcing those blocks to be limited outside of very specific circumstances would only make their job easier

you know what, let's just skip to the proposed solutions and address them in order

1. warnings are often required, but sometimes, someone is so obviously not here that admins will just skip the middle man and not give them the time to disrupt more stuff
2. indeffing requiring at least three admins sounds fine in theory, but fails when you realize that that's too much effort spent for what could be clear-cut cases of disruption, and people unlikely to disrupt more generally won't be indeffed anyway
3. a three strike system, on top of conflicting with solution 2, only really means vandals will get a second and third chance
4. kinda goes without saying that this many caveats would make indeffs less common, not sure why this is in the list tbh
5. appeal responses rely on admin activity. wikipedia has no deadlines, and this seems to me like enforcing a deadline of "fast"
6. parole hearings would be a massive inconvenience for everyone. imagine going back to an account that's been indeffed a year ago for a parole hearing, and then not even getting unblocked in the first place
7. already in place
8. already in place
9. see 2
10. define "block-happy" in a context that takes the reasoning for blocks into account, and then name admins you think are engaging in that behavior

    (don't actually do that)

11. already in place
12. i'll get back to this later :)

and as another aside, counting ips in indef stats doesn't actually help your case, since ips can't be indeffed

extremely important request 9 preamble

get that piss lorax outta here before the ffd gets to it, it's disgusting. i thought your demographic hated piss christ, but here you are recreating it ad nauseam (which isn't hard considering that it's piss)

i hope you're just lying when you say the images were "made by a friend" to save face (and then tagging them as own work anyway), because even i could make something that looks better in a couple minutes. in fact, i probably should...

request 9: "adopt a legislative process"

ignoring that this is just "guy who has only heard of x wants everything to be like x", this is kind of hard to discuss on its own, since the reasons that it wouldn't work are already given in the further requests and request 1, so let's just skip to the best part

finally, the best part

the hypothetical. what i believe would happen if your suggested changes came to fruition. i know full well that i'm generally a little lacking in the common sense department, so keep in mind that i'm deliberately trying to lowball my hypotheses

• further requests apply:
  • wikipedia joins the encyclosphere: still no idea what that is and what makes it different from diffs, but i guess it means wikipedia is now a giant nft?
  • term limits are implemented: admins are now on a timer. this usually means they'll be churned through and spat out
    • staying an admin through terms becomes a procedural slog, so a couple of them dip over this
  • an independent organization handles appeals. admins also handle appeals. why is the organization there?
    • there's no guarantee that the organization will be familiar with wikipedia's functions, competent, or operating in good faith
      • there's no guarantee that the organization will exist
    • does the organization take place over admins? if so, then why are admins there? if not, why is it there?
      • regardless, admins will be the ones to carry the deeds out anyway, unless the organization's members are inserted as admins. let's save the consequences of this for request 6...
  • ai is used for management decisions, as it's well-known to be good at due to its ability of being held accountable. wikipedia unlocks the true lost sibling of light and dark mode: yellow on yellow
  • ips can no longer edit. at work and can't log in for whatever technical reason? too bad, better luck next time
  • work assessments effectively make wikipedia a job (or worse, a mobile game). surely that's all that comes out of it
  • meatpuppetry basically becomes legal. surely that's all that comes out of it, no risk of canvassing or anything to skew consensuses (which you don't believe should exist) (yes, by the way, "consensuses" is a word)
  • pages are tagged as not appropriate for children... whatever that could possibly mean for some of them. wikipedia becomes way easier to censor
  • we "suddenly" (very gradually, if ever) get 110 billion more stubs, so i can mourn my ancestors prunk and tont
  • wikipedia becomes more inclusive, with some minor caveats
• request 1 applies:
  • consensus just stops being a thing i guess
  • consensus simultaneously does not stop being a thing
  • i'm forbidden from referring to this new process as "nonsensus" as it's a bad pun
  • "per x" votes become illegal i guess. rip just agreeing with someone
• request 2 applies:
  • every opinion is given equal weight, regardless of how many others agree that they're quacks (i've seen the responses to your announcement about working with tucker carlson, don't think there won't be infighting due to this)
  • everyone gets to decide who edits what, effectively making mainspace and talkspace a host of personal blogs
  • articles are now accepted based on amount of content, so brands are more than happy to put ads there, since they just have to be long enough. articles on every individual war thunder sponsor segment across all of youtube start mysteriously popping up
  • articles have their own personal rulesets, which people are expected to know and respect, regardless of how open they actually are to any form of discussion
• request 3 applies:
  • blacklists are no longer a thing. sources can't be deprecated, considered unreliable, or anything of the sort without heavily draining processes, and even then, the effects don't last for long
  • personal opinions, random videos, and "i made it the fuck up" become viable sources
  • religion becomes the norm, and not just another topic of editing. i'm sure people of different religions and agnostics will be overjoyed to see other religions shoved in their faces
  • wikipedia specifically panders to conservatives (still neutral btw, just more focused on them)
• request 4 applies:
  • religion remains the norm because yes
  • we get all the views, with still no guarantee of people joining in to spread them (functionally, this changes nothing)
  • those darn progressives mosey on outta my neutral-yet-suspiciously-conservative-centered wiki
  • academia becomes secondary to personal opinion
    • in the same vein, the word of people who believe in things strongly enough will be taken over that of people who actually know what they're talking about, just because it has the bigger numbers
      • this acts as an exception to the "all claims are given equal weight" and inclusionism clauses
  • wikipedia begins to actively appeal to specific groups, instead of just detailing stuff about them. this leads to piles upon piles of puff pieces and other stuff that starts with p
  • any form of bias or opinion is looked down upon when establishing not consensus about which sources can be considered reliable, unless it's towards something you like
• request 5 applies:
  • rules become absolute
    • if they cover all possible situations, "discussions" boil down to people reading the rules and going "okay yeah that's what it says for this specific scenario" without actually discussing their edits at any considerable measure, and individuality becomes a detriment. wikipedia basically becomes labor, with rules ballooning in length so hard that some people could take days to find the rule that addresses one specific scenario, with one specific mentality enforced even when it would be a bad idea to stick to it
      • someone has to actually write this all-encompassing ruleset in such a way that it never ever needs to be changed, ever
    • if they don't, we come into the same problem that plagues religions, in that we need to start fitting triangles into square holes. that is, adapting tangentially similar passages into contexts that have nothing to do with them, and being surprised when that just makes a mess out of any given process, or when people interpret stuff differently
  • trolls now have to cite anything else to get away with their trolling
    • the other systems make sure they get away anyway
• request 6 applies:
  • "leaders" (whatever that means) are required to use their real-life identities in an era where personal info is very open to being stolen
  • their identities being as open to the public as they are makes them vulnerable to real-life attacks, including of the kind that can turn them or the people around them into corpses
    • if not that, it's not like stalkers and other such people are starving for ways to ruin people's lives
  • no more silliness or fun grr
  • to compensate for all of this, admins (and other such people) now get paid. editing becomes an actual job
    • as in a literal 9-5 (or 8-6 around here)
      • as in people will be actively encouraged to become admins over financial incentives, and not over actually wanting to contribute
        • as in they'll try to do the absolute bare minimum to make themselves look good to whoever handles adminship
          • as in they'll just try to have the bigger numbers so they'll then be hired as admins by people who are easily impressed by big numbers
            • as in they'll use their adminship to just do as much as possible to make their numbers bigger so their wallets' numbers get bigger
              • as in they will have conflicts of interest with wikipedia itself, and their trustworthiness will be jeopardized across the entire site
    • to handle paying a rotation of motivationally questionable admins who will have at least a year to do whatever they want so long as enough of it goes under the radar that they're not almost immediately desysopped for gross incompetence or active vandalism, wikipedia will almost definitely have to go for-profit
      • as in it'll need aggressive monetization
        • as in it'll need ads
          • as in wikipedia will be functionally no different from fandom
        • hell, it might even dabble in paywalling
    • people who aren't in "governing" positions just need to keep doing volunteer work while their peers get paid for it
• request 7 appli-
  • did you think i was done!? where's the wmf gonna get the budget or connections to provide "free assistance" or "indemnify" people with insurance and stuff from? surely that money's gonna have to come from somewhere, and who's gonna be paying to maintain what's functionally just a worse reddit wearing wikipedia's skin?
    • what's it gonna do to prevent people who are just coming in for insurance fraud to have their way? as the ones providing the insurance, you'd expect at least some level of foresight regarding what will be done with said insurance. this isn't the kind of system you can just tape together with thoughts and prayers. if you want it established, you'll need some kind of plan for the obvious worst case scenarios it causes
      • what's it gonna do when someone's not an admin anymore? will their benefits go down the drain? will they get some kind of veteran protection?
        • are you aware that this entire logic will have to apply to nearly every single location in the entire world? do you know how much paperwork that is? how many insurance companies will have to be contacted, how many people will have to be managed in different languages, and how much this will all cost? you can't argue locations without admins won't need to be covered, because you can't guarantee there won't be an admin from there by next week. this whole thing should be done in advance, or deliberately limited to only a small handful of english-speaking countries while everyone else has to fight for themselves
  • articles' subjects get direct access to their contact info in their articles, effectively making them facebook pages someone else made for them. i have no idea what this has to do with the meat of request 6
    • this is on top of their websites or emails, which are generally already included in their articles when possible, and to the extent that it doesn't get into the aforementioned problem
• request 7 applies (this time for real):
  • people get to rate articles yay
    • do they just use likes and dislikes? then articles are boiled down into an easily manipulated binary of "good" and "bad"
    • do they use a star system? then articles are still boiled down into an easily manipulated binary of "over 4.5 stars" and "bad"
    • do they use reddit-style awards? well, there's the money, but you yourself probably know how many things will go down in flames over this, if crypto-related subreddits are anything to go off of
    • regardless of the method, canvassing, review bombs, and bots are used to manipulate ratings
    • considering how often articles are edited, ratings can become obsolete within days, if not hours, if not seconds, if not- i actually have no idea what the shortest interval between bot edits is
      • if editors are given the option to manually reset ratings, that gets abused to r'lyeh and back
      • if they're reset automatically or based on specific criteria related to the ratings, that still gets abused, in bad faith or otherwise
      • regardless, ratings don't even stick
  • ai gets to rate articles yay
    • it's prone to misjudging articles in order to "just say the words that get the most engagement", hallucinating arguments towards ratings, and plenty more
    • readers, given the option of letting an ai think for them, would rather just see what it has to say than actually read the articles
      • they'll also very likely misinterpret what the ai has to say anyway
  • a decentralized system is- eh, that means nothing these days, aside from probably making every edit conflict a fork and forcing users to store way more of wikipedia's stuff than would be necessary without it. phones get suspiciously hot, pcs start hyperventilating, we just reenact μtorrent's crypto mining system scandal but i don't get "free" dosh out of it
  • wikipedia is made more collaborative as a result! does that just mean marketing executives get tossed at it? how do you quantify collaborativity? why is "collaborativity" a word?
• request 8 applies:
  • indefs become extremely rare. they have to be done by committee after someone has already been blocked thrice and no less than 7 admins (or independent organization members) (or chatbots) have to be involved. somehow, socking is the only exception to this
  • trolls get the steven universe treatment: just get a second chance lol
  • wikipedia starts growing admins on trees or something, and tells them to work faster, immediately solving all problems related to appeal speed
  • if not that, it hires admins, and hopes that they'll use their powers for good, and not just do whatever makes them the most fat stacks
  • parole hearings become a thing. they really just amount to a lot of people making unblock requests at the same time, and tired admins might make sloppy judgements
  • police officers are trained in patience. this one is actually good, i hope they implement it someday
  • admins who block too much are desysopped. unless criteria for what applies as "block-happy" are determined, it's not unlikely that if a bunch of socks are found, the admin who blocks them will be punished for it. this is especially true if it's automated
• request 9 applies:
  • wikipedia becomes a full-on government, with its own supreme court
  • the wmf's word becomes law
  • requests 2, 3, 4, and 6 apply again for some reason, even though you yourself already acknowledged 2 and 4 as possibly contradictory to each other
  • citing essays as policy becomes illegal. i guess this just means people have to cite the policies those essays cite, which means that instead of wp:snow, they have to cite discussion closure policies and tape iar to them
  • real-life identities are used to establish votes, which means everyone's personal info is up for grabs, hell yeah!
  • wikipedia pays people using some of the leftover porn ad money (or whatever) to interrupt whatever it is they're doing and fly to business meetings every once in a while just to be sure they exist. i'm sure airplane tickets to the us are pretty cheap in brazil, mozambique, egypt, and scotland. i'm only not entirely sure brazil is real...
  • most policies are rewritten. surely that won't take years to finish
• and finally, the possible cumulative outcomes...
  • people don't like the changes and leave
  • people don't like the changes so they're not implemented
  • people don't like the changes so they're rolled back
  • the changes turn wikipedia into a slurry of all the worst corporate and/or political things around, and implodes under its own ballooning weight without people who can and/or want to maintain it
  • some people leave in disgust, others in solidarity, others because twitter heard about the whole ordeal and basically made a fanfic out of the situation that some users started treating as canon. wikipedia's active userbase (counting ips) is potentially cut down by over 50%
  • wikipedia turns into truth social, with a userbase to match

i guess the bottom line of my thoughts is