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Comment by bondolo | Hacker News Reader

No formal process is described but to be accountable actions taken should be defensible or explainable and generally they were not. There was also usually no evidence that the reviewer had any basis for making the assessment which led to their conclusion.

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Thank you u/bondolo and u/bawolff.

I'm fascinated by governance, transparency, accountability. For instance, I've been casually researching how to measure effectiveness of state legislators, how the misc rules impact the games they play.

Learning how wikipedia does things, for better or worse, is on my todo list. I'm hoping there's works like Peter Hintjens' Social Architecture for wikis. http://hintjens.com/books

A starting place to see how the sausage is made might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SIGNPOST which is an internal newspaper type thing (although recently its not quite as well regarded as it used to be). Usually it has summaries and links to the big disputes and discussions, especially anything going through arbcom (sort of like an internal court system) Of course big disputes tend to be a bit different than "small" disputes.

Wikipedia has all sorts of internal pages documenting these things, E.g. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_power_structure and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_sub...

Also, much of the complaints/dispute pages are very public and you can read them e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests

Terrific. Thanks for the links, and the edit. :)

After skimming these, and poking around, I haven't found any metrics for participants. Like applying Moneyball notions to wikis. A very effective, popular example is GitHub's contribution visualization.

From the hip, I imagine sparklines for various metrics. The badges are nice, but depicting the timeline is important feedback. Like how many articles an editor helped shepherd to publication over time. So it'd be more obvious if editors are gatekeeping, how many of their decisions are appealed, how many decisions they lose, etc.

Frankly, the wikipedia governance is overwhelming for a noob.

Unsatisfied with most depictions of how bills become laws, I created a graph to represent the tortured path each bill takes. (I really need to stay off HackerNews and work on my projects instead.) Imagine one of those American Gladiator course challenges as a flowchart.

Again, thank you.

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