I went to the top right corner of the page

Your ideas are much too drastic for my tastes. The wiki's in an awkward place right now, too big to be run anarchically but too small to maintain any separation between rules and personalities.

Rules that clearly define a difference between those with responsibility and everyone else — which is the essence of bureaucracy — only make sense for a multi-faceted community. I'll use Uncyclopedia for an example (ignoring the fact that Uncyc has always been shitty, and has gotten somewhat worse over time). On Uncyc, the community is so large that some editors only ever edit the Forumspace, some the Gamespace, some a particular subset of articles, some only show up on the Vote for Feature/Deletion pages, some just do article reviews, some the Newspace, etc. It's a huge clusterfuck that needs official empowered admins — people who keep watch over everything and occasionally plunge their hands into the morass to fix something. It's the only way to effectively maintain and hold the disparate subcommunities together.

RationalWiki isn't anywhere near that level. There's a gulf between the CP crowd and everyone else, yes, but it's not yet unmanageable (though I do wonder if there will be complaints about the disappearance of view counters from any CP:WIGOers who don't pay attention to discussions on the Saloon bar or Tech Support). Whatever half-assed system we have will do fine until things get genuinely awful — I'd give it between two and five years before that happens.

I obviously shouldn't piss off for several days in a row...

...the problem I see is a little bit of a specific effect of the above: we're too big for such a mobocratic system to work quickly. By the time everyone who wants a say has had their say, a week has passed - and a lot of crap can happen in a week that evolves a conversation well off topic. Hence HCM.

The better interim idea is to time limit discussions, votes and ideas and if you weren't logged on that day just say Tough Fucking Shit. That's the only way you could even have a pretence of mob rule that still works around here.

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?

@Ghengis, I agree completely. I have had people in real life ask me about a good resource to counter the anti-science movement and I HAVE given and linked RationalWiki... but the state of affairs about getting anything done here is atrocious and I have blatantly told people to not join the maintenance and contribution of the actual site because I don't want to share the drama and stupidity with any of my real life friends. There's a horrible attitude here that focuses on acceptable harassment targets and just lets established frat boys do whatever they want to remain here, not contribute, shit at other people, and never, ever pay any form of consequence for it. And then, when they do go just a bit too far out of line, they get to commandeer the whole site and whine about their rights being taken away that they never used other than to just shit on other people. And the amount of shitting on other people just discourages actual content creation: why even begin to work on an article when you have no idea if the community will want to pitch in?

This is not the kind of place I myself want to have to use as a resource, but it has the potential to be a truly great one. We're referenced in print, for petesakes. We should be united by a purpose, and that purpose should not be shitting on eachother.

I agree that there should be some kind of contribution bar for voting. In my university's SSA, to be a voting member, one must go on two community service outings a semester. This prevents people from flooding in and stacking votes; they must be a contributing member of the club to have a say in what goes on in it. I would support a similar system on rationalwiki.

Oh, and by the way: only one person at my university has ever complained about this system.

He's a raging sociopath and an utter asswipe. So in my mind, anyone that whines 'why should I HAVE TO HELP in order to have a say in what goes on here' is likely to be a person of similar character.

Nicely said.

Thing is, there is enough of us here who are willing to change for the good of the site. The trouble is, nice guys finish last in this system where everyone gets a say and Joe Cool can just do what they hell they like. Votes and proposals can happen as much as we like, but it won't change in a practical sense unless there's some sort of coup that rocks the boat and sticks (I won't apologise for f**king all the 'crats last May, I stand by doing that) as we can come up with ideas, but it'll always revert back.