Esperanza: How and why Hope was crushed

[Abd]

I have an archive of the documentation for Wikipedia: Through the Looking Glass, the book by Barbour, Buckner et al, and it was requested that before I publish those pages, sources be archived, which is a substantial task. As well, the pages are not in wikitext, so importing them to a wiki is also tedious (they have been made available in .odt2 and .pdf). These conditions mean that it may take me as much as a day to prep a file, if there is no collaboration, and there are roughly a thousand files. Volunteers are invited; and it would also be quite useful if the original wikitext were made available, it would cut the work perhaps in half.

This is the page on Esperanza.

There are some missing fragments, deleted for unknown reasons. I've marked them with "[* note]" and there are more. I've seen this in other files, something that was apparently considered important when the file was created is omitted.

Meanwhile, the history of Esperanza, reviewed, clearly demonstrates how and why the Wikipedia structure remained so inefficient and irresponsible. There is much in this, and I'm studying it, and will probably write commentaries.

It's plain as day: whatever might create responsibility in the community was to be crushed, viciously as exemplary punishment. While it would be an error to blame the result on the deletion nominator, her nomination was pure self-interested reactivity to perceived attitudes of a very large community which she considered "non-Wikipedian," and it fed into reactions like hers in the general community.

The way to move beyond that was clear; I proposed it years ago, probably around 2009, before I knew this history except in round outline. Anything that might actually create functional consensus negotiation with wide representation, or that might create responsible executives, was to be "terminated with extreme prejudice," The vehemence of this was obvious by the time I was involved. Given the declared intention to crush anything like it, any genuine consensus-formation activity would need to be off-wiki. There never was enough interest in a general-purpose structure, only scattered efforts by special interests, crushed if found. All naive. (or, more likely, disciplined and effective, and probably paid or supported like that).

Comments are welcome here, of course. PM me for a wikitop.cc account to comment there or help out.

Wikitop.cc is intended for "top-level" consensus negotiation. For those not familiar with Free Association/Delegable Proxy concepts, there can be more than one "top-level meeting," if a top-level meeting is dominated by a faction. There is freedom and power in diversity, combined with voluntary structure. While I don't think it was deliberate, the deletionist critics of Esperanza functionally lied about what was possible.

The book project has been mentioned on Wikipediocracy, and also the Esperanza page.

[boredbird]

Anything that might actually create functional consensus negotiation with wide representation…genuine consensus-formation activity…Wikitop.cc is intended for "top-level" consensus negotiation.

Talk about Kool Aid.

[Abd]

Haters hate and trolls troll.
From Poetlister:

Nonentities, claiming to be vigilant, are jealous of people with real achievements. They proxy for banned user Timothy Usher, using his dubious claims in vain attempts to belittle them.

. . . or is it the other way around?

[ericbarbour]

FWIW the Esperanza story was important to early WP history, since it was one of Essjay's big pink elephants. JCarriker started it and Essjay waltzed in and took over--and people allowed him to do it. Its massive failure showed that WP governance was headed off a cliff of crazy.

Unfortunately, as I warned, some of the discussions of it were deleted without trace long ago.

[Abd]

What I see is that Esperanza was killed by haters. It was defective, but the defects could have been remedied. What happened was repeated with many initiatives.

The argument in the final MfD was presented by someone who hated the Esperanzans, because they allegedly hated her as a deletionist. There was no consensus, and the problem with allowing people to organize voluntarily to support the community and community spirit was what?

Esperanza elected management had no authority, could not compel, and Esperanza set up structures that did survive and continued. Such organizations in the real world often slow down, become inactive for a time, so why was it "salted," to prevent it from being reactivated? Did the community really hate individual initiative? Rather, I see this as massive knee-jerk reactivity to "bureaucracy," "elitism" and Other Bad Things. And those who didn't hate did not protect the hated. Yes, governance off the cliff into crazy.

[Graaf Statler]

Anything that might actually create functional consensus negotiation with wide representation, or that might create responsible executives.

WP-Nl in a nutshell.

Where is Mdd, Abd?

[Graaf Statler]

Wikipedia is a content monster, it lives on data (useful or useless). No one can check all the content
for quality, because the Monster must be fed.

Well mister Barbour, here we are, the phenomena Wikipedia in a nutshell. It's a hungry sausage factory what eats it's own children one by one.

Very, very nice. I see I laid out a reform plan there. People believed it was impossible, and reform is impossible if people believe it is impossible. The plan started with two people. My slogan back then: "How many people does it take to change the world?"

Two. Finding two willing to commit, willing to work for it (even if it is only to find a third), that's what is really difficult.

I concluded (pre-Wikipedia!) that the real problem was entrenched despair. Nobody believes that change is possible, so we will not work for it, we don't want to be disappointed. Pass the potato chips.

You are right mister Lomax. But Eric points at a system error in the wiki system what you can't fix without a complete revise.
And what you never can repair with a max consensus project what Esperanza was as it seems to me.

Because a max consensus system ends up in insane waving with pirate flags in the Europarlement for a awful lot of money.