User:Abd

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Abd ul-Rahman Lomax, born Dennis G. Lomax, May 24, 1944, also known as Daniel Lomax.

My primary interest is in the methods by which human communities communicate, coordinate, and cooperate. I am one of the multiple independent inventors of Delegable proxy, also known as Liquid democracy, and the first one, as far as I know, to apply these concepts to Free Associations, examples of which would be Alcoholics Anonymous and, to a substantial degree, the Wikipedia community (as distinct from the Wikimedia Foundation).

In Alcoholics Anonymous, there is no power structure that controls individual members or the local organizational unit, the AA meeting. All meetings are independent, but they are connected by cross-membership and coordinating committees, such as Intergroup. And there is an international organization, a nonprofit corporation, which holds copyrights and protects the name Alcoholics Anonymous. This would be AA World Services, Inc.

The Wikipedia community corresponds to the general membership of AA. AA meetings and structures are generally entrusted to trustees, "directly responsible to those they serve." Wikipedia does not have "officers" for articles, but it's an idea that could be taken up; these would be administrators, elected by a supermajority -- ideally a consensus -- of the editors of an article, able to deal with controversies as they arise while being familiar with the issues. The deficiency I have seen in the Wikipedia system as it generally operates is that an article has no administrator, so when arbitration or other intervention is requested, the arbiter can be quite unfamiliar with the issues and can make snap judgements that are errors. I've seen it more than once. Note that we don't have to have any top-down permission to elect an article secretary, we can do it by consensus at any time.

And Wikipedia as the *web site* has a board. It's not a democracy. And likewise AA has AA World Services, Inc., which is not a democracy. But AAWS *by tradition* will respect a decision by a consensus of the AA General Service Conference, consensus usually being defined as a two-thirds majority of delegates.

In other words, it's been done before. There is over fifty years of precedent for much of what Wikipedia is doing in AA.

Could Delegable Proxy be used for Wikipedia? I think so. The combination of the Free Association concept with DP, FA/DP, is only used for advice. It does not control power. It is *very* Wikipedian, so close, in fact, that I'm going to be moving my work in creating FAs to Wikipedia. There is no need to re-invent the wheel. DP need not be an official structure, it can be done voluntarily by those who choose to participate in it. It does not deprive non-participants of any rights. It merely allows those who *do* participate to have weighted representation. It would seem vulnerable to sock puppetry, but, in fact, it is not, because FAs seek consensus, and sock puppets have a terrible time imitating this when large numbers are involved and there are those watching for them. And even if a whole army of sock puppets assembly in opposition to a small group, they can't force "consensus," though they could certainly create an appearance. This fake consensus binds nobody. They get a mouthful of hair.

Essentially, DP could be the way that the Wikimedia_Foundation uses to measure consensus, avoiding the serious participation bias of non-DP polls. It's worth looking at. (The participation bias remains, but it is rebalanced by weight given to those who are trusted by others as representing them; further, in a mature DP system, the proxies actually drive the consensus; that is, if some overall policy or statement is being approved, the proxies, being trusted, are in the best position to influence and explain it to their clients. The devil is in the details, but it turns out that, quite likely, the proper structures will freely evolve, for the proper structures are *efficient*, thus driven by entropy, once the seed is in place.)

/AfD: formula for conflict