User:AABb1221/Notes on ownership

I've wrote lots of messy notes on wiki management. Due to my extreme lack of enthusiasm and motivation to organize messy notes - a process that takes a lot of time but hardly generates new knowledge - but some ideas need to be disseminated, I directly publish, translate, and distribute some important notes without much organization. A few sentences unimportant to English users have been removed compared to the Chinese version.

Who does a community belong to? Why? Does it belong to everyone, contributors, enthusiasts, server owners, founders, bureaucrats, or the administration team...? What does this "belonging" or "ownership" mean? Decision-making power? Copyright (wikis generally waive most copyright, though (1) a few rights are still retained, and (2) this is not absolute; some wikis retain most rights)? Other forms of ownership include infrastructure property rights and contribution ownership beyond copyright (belonging to the contributors just like copyright)... and some completely unimportant possible interpretations.

Contribution Ownership, represented by Copyright

If this "ownership" refers to copyright, then clearly it belongs to the contributor. Specifically, the copyright of any given piece of content belongs to its specific contributor. Talking about the ownership of a wiki as a whole is legally meaningless.

This page classifies wiki edits, pointing out other contribution categories. Content contributions generate copyright; technical maintenance and administrative contributions do not generate copyright, but the logic is analogous. However, copyright is still treated here as the representative of contribution ownership, because it is the only category of wiki contribution ownership recognized by law and thus supported by extensive legal scholarship.

Infrastructure Property Rights

Legally owner of servers, domains, technical system copyrights, or any infrastructure property ≠ ruler of the community.

Secondly we dispute Cocopuff’s ownership claim as he is presenting it: he owned the server, and he still does and can use it however he wishes. What he does not own are the community (who we are currently consulting), the domain (this was under Tali’s remit), or the very large amount of unpaid labor put into the platform by tech and community volunteers, the reason it exists and has gone as far as it has.

— Clarification on behalf of SkyWiki Team (No link because of Abuse Filter)

Decision-Making Power or Final Adjudication

This is a question of the legitimacy of power. Due to the complexity of human values, solutions to legitimacy problems are not unique; multiple self-consistent, rationally defensible legitimacy theories can coexist simultaneously.

I declare that my position returns to Enthusiast Sovereignty.

When I previously thought about voting rights regulations, I considered many edge cases, such as people who are not enthusiasts but contribute enormously. Generally, it is correct to consider minority and extreme cases when making rules. However, for voting rights specifically, even if a tiny minority of people do/do not belong to the "master" group in principle, their votes are unlikely to affect outcomes. Based on the need for clear rules, such extreme minorities can be ignored. Complex, "fine-grained" voting rights regulations are more likely to leave room for manipulation by malicious administrators or carefully disguised discussion disruptors (though such people are also very rare). My previous attempt to empower contributors was partly caused by such misguided thinking. However, the following will also explain that Contributor Sovereignty is a reasonable and defensible theory.

It should be noted that the source of legitimacy does not strictly correspond to the definition of voting rights: Implementary Adjustment is important. It means that if we pursue the precise implementation of certain principles, we may instead cause serious problems—such as consuming excessive resources or undermining the very principles we aim to enforce—so they should not be allowed to become rules directly. Rules may state these principles, but perhaps with qualifiers like "in principle." Sometimes this is quite reasonable (for example, ignoring the tiny minority of non-enthusiasts who contribute enormously justifies empowering those who meet edit-count thresholds without creating rules to strip rights from such people). Sometimes it is rather strained (for example, supporters of Contributor Sovereignty below may use "contribution magnitude is subjective and difficult to measure" as a reason to implement one-person-one-vote). For instance, even if we declare that all humanity—even those completely unrelated to the wiki—has decision-making power in principle, we can also say that without an edit-count threshold for voting rights, people could easily forge public opinion using sockpuppets, so in practice voting rights must require meeting an edit threshold.

The following will briefly examine some other possible sources of legitimacy and their probably self-consistent, defensible theories.

Enthusiasts

The following are approximately true equations (this "approximate" means their deviation from reality can be ignored based on the above philosophy):

Enthusiasts = Active readers + Potential readers

Discussants ⊂ Contributors ⊂ Active readers (Using ⊆ would include wikis where there are no enthusiasts beyond the founder or a few friends of theirs—mere personal amusement projects—which fall outside the scope of this discussion.)

For convenience, potential readers are also counted as readers below; define Enthusiast = Reader. Contributors ⊂ Readers, though this identity is rarely acknowledged. In a sense, contributors are representatives of readers. Most of the time we should still say "enthusiasts," because people rarely realize that wiki contributors are also readers; saying "reader sovereignty" sounds as if some invisible external force is dominating the wiki and exploiting contributors' content output, which would demotivate contributors. Define Readers − Contributors = Passive readers (readers who don't contribute). Hobby is the essential cause; reading demand is its derived external property. The term "reader" emphasizes the enthusiast's stake in the wiki.

In my values, human worth lies in social value. Since the people (readers) have this demand (not unreasonable or extravagant), we should try to satisfy it. This ought to be the primary purpose of a wiki's existence and the goal of all its content production. Most people edit wikis for the reason of gaining personal satisfaction and a sense of participation, or fulfilling their own reading needs—these purposes are entirely reasonable. Contributors themselves are members of the people. However, because passive readers far outnumber contributors, the vast majority of the value of contributors' work lies in its value to passive readers. Contributors cannot contribute only for the selfish benefit it brings them—this is called equality (attaching oneself and every specific other with the same importance; if you wish to serve yourself, you must equally serve every specific other, and because the number of others far exceeds your single self, you must serve others far more than yourself) or selflessness. The primary purpose of a wiki is to serve readers. Unfortunately, as analyzed above, writing this into rules would only demotivate editors and ultimately harm readers; therefore, this can only ever be a personal viewpoint and principle, never a rule.

Since the primary purpose of a wiki is to serve readers, readers naturally have the right to define what kind of service they want. Readers directly receive content services: Should the tone be humorous or serious? Should spoilers be collapsed? ... Readers directly hold content authority; banning users is mainly to prevent them from disrupting content; appointing administrators is in the hope that they will ban benevolently... Content output is always the wiki's primary shallow-level goal; other community behaviors mainly exist to maintain it. Since content is directly controlled by readers, readers indirectly hold governance authority. In short, sovereignty over the wiki belongs to Enthusiast Sovereignty, or, Reader Sovereignty.

This theory supports voting right equality: people (whether this "people" refers toenthusiasts, contributors, or discussants, this statement holds) generally does not differ significantly in their degree of interest in a work or subculture.Excessively intense interest is unstable and is soon diluted by time (this is a conclusion of psychology and neuroscience). People spends roughly the same amount of time binge-watching a series or reading a novel, generating roughly the same wiki reading demand. Even if there truly are huge differences in individual interest and stakes that would in principle justify weighted voting by enthusiasm, we have absolutely no way of knowing each person's degree of interest, so this principle is completely unimplementable; even if we use mind-reading to determine every discussant's degree of interest, for the vast majority of wiki topics this value would be completely unrelated to users' positions on the vast majority of matters requiring a vote (with very few exceptions, such as rare political-topic wikis). When the number of discussants approaches infinity, it would not change the conclusion at all; when the number of discussants is small, would instead cause inexplicable huge statistical fluctuations, causing discussants to lose statistical representativeness of enthusiasts.

Notably, under Enthusiast Sovereignty, blocked users still have voting rights in principle. Vandalism-only accounts can be deprived of voting rights on the grounds that they may intentionally disrupt voting by deliberately choosing absurd options(or having no enthusiasm at all?), but there is no reason to deprive general disruptors of voting rights. This voting right may not be exercisable in a compliant manner (if remote voting on an appeal page does not count as compliant), but this is a separate question from whether it exists.

This theory leaves leeway for empowering other groups: the above only states that serving readers and content production is the wiki's primary purpose. For example,the personal sense of participation mentioned above is also a kind of stake, and empowering contributors for this personal sense of participation is reasonable. This has no bearing on the delineation of voting rights boundaries, because contribution thresholds have already been established as an anti-sockpuppet mechanism (this applies to any reasonable legitimacy theory, regardless of whether they acknowledge the importance of contribution); however, some might say that sense of participation is proportional to contribution volume and thereby derive weighted voting by contribution. Or, as I previously suggested, community purposes could be a secondary purpose of the wiki, established precisely to protect the social sense of gain of socializers as a stake. But regardless of which of the above amendments one adopts, because the groups of contributors and socializers are far smaller than readers, readers remain the primary source of legitimacy for wiki power.

For a comprehensive encyclopedia like Wikipedia, there may be no "enthusiasts" to speak of, but the term "reader" still holds.

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Content output is always the wiki's primary shallow-level goal; other community behaviors mainly exist to maintain it. Since content is directly controlled by readers, readers indirectly hold governance authority. In short, sovereignty over the wiki belongs to Enthusiast Sovereignty, or, Reader Sovereignty.

There is a logical flaw here: this passage derives governance authority from content authority, but it only proves that the ultimate legitimacy of power comes from readers (the legitimacy of governance authority lies in protecting content output to serve readers); it does not prove that readers should make decisions on non-content issues. Who authorizes and to whom authority is granted are two different questions, although generally the two are solved together.

In fact, general legitimacy theories only need to answer why power is legitimate, sometimes answering who grants it. Here, the flaw appears only when answering to whom it is granted.

If we follow my existing logic—that the legitimacy of power comes from protecting readers' interests—then authority seems to belong to the group that can most efficiently maintain wiki content output. But this is not a professional problem; there are no experts to whom authority can be granted. Equality for all—where "all" means all humanity, including those completely unrelated to the wiki—may mean that everyone should be treated identically if there is no justification. Since there is no justification to differentiate the voting rights of core contributors with administrator rights, marginal enthusiasts, and unrelated persons, they should all possess voting rights together. In principle, voting rights belong to all humanity.

The essential reason for reaching this conclusion seems to be that Enthusiast Sovereignty presupposes and acknowledges a scenario in which everyone serves everyone else, everyone is absolutely selfless, and refuses to acknowledge contributors' selfish possessiveness over their own contributions though this is already minimum selfishness which is usually considered justified. This sounds like a completely unrealistic utopian ideal. However, the following has already revealed what consequences acknowledging such selfishness leads to, and the copyright statement at the bottom of this page reveals the dreamlike real-world feasibility of negating any selfishness. Although a certain degree of selfishness and a certain degree of selflessness are both engraved in the genes of Homo sapiens, within the scope of a wiki, only the latter should be acknowledged; the former must be thoroughly denied and ignored. Since economists can build the towering edifice of economics on the obviously factually false basic assumption that all people are absolutely rational and absolutely selfish, we can certainly build the towering edifice of wiki political philosophy on the exact opposite assumption. Wikis are utopias, and can only be utopias. This utopian ideal points toward the disappearance of all differences among humanity, seemingly implying the negation of all "self-determining" cliques, including wiki discussants, contributors, or enthusiasts.

A formulation that makes this doctrine relatively easier to accept: the unrelated can also become enthusiasts at any time. They are potential enthusiasts with potential stakes. What is the difference between an unrelated person and a potential reader with enthusiasm? Furthermore, imagine that for some miraculous reason, all people in the world decide to hold a referendum on some matter in a wiki, and the result contradicts the local wiki vote—which takes precedence?

Although meatpuppets are included in the category of "the people," on closer inspection, rallying meatpuppets to vote still counts as forging public opinion. Under normal circumstances, a wiki will not see large numbers of unrelated people attempting to vote.

This theory implies that there is no true "external force". The term "external interference" is fundamentally untenable. However, since what is specifically referred to as "external interference" is basically wrong, we can give it a suitable definition to re-establish this statement. ("External interference" is a common rhetoric used by tyrants to shift internal conflicts, confuse the public, and stir up opposition, but this does not mean that it does not exist.)

Although not perfectly correspondent, this theory clearly points toward negating the right of self-deletion—the right of original authors to delete their own contributions.

We could say that a wiki is the business of its contributors/enthusiasts, that contributors/enthusiasts have the right to self-governance free from outside interference. This is an entirely different logic. This "right of self-governance" is different from the possessive right over one's own contributions discussed below; we have neither actively denied nor actively affirmed it: whence comes its legitimacy? Why should this "self" be contributors or enthusiasts?

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"This utopian ideal points toward the disappearance of all differences among humanity, seemingly implying the negation of all 'self-determining' cliques, including wiki discussants, contributors, or enthusiasts."

I examined the underlying principles behind this statement more deeply and, using it as a lens, considered different real-world situations: why do many "self-determining" groups in reality have the right to self-governance?

Generally, we assume that people in society are primarily driven by self-interest. Many autonomous groups in society are also self-interested: they are composed of people with common interests and work to protect those common interests—which can be legitimate and justified interests. For example, labor unions. If decision-making power were granted to all humanity, external forces would interfere with their decisions to protect their own interests, thereby undermining the legitimate and justified interests of the group. Therefore, outside forces can be excluded from self-governance. This also applies to wikis. Enthusiasts can organize wikis to resist vandalism from external troll groups, or (to use a gaming wiki example) protest against an unscrupulous update by a capitalist game developer that harms players—wikis can become mass organizations through which enthusiasts defend their legitimate welfare. We ourselves may be absolutely selfless, but we cannot therefore ignore the fact that others are selfish. Earlier, the reason I mentioned sovereignty belonging to all humanity was simply that there was no reason to deny it, and the principle of equality as I understood it could lead to that as a default condition. But now we have found such a reason.

This theory directly points toward the importance of wiki community purposes. By highlighting external forces, it correspondingly highlights the importance of internal community solidarity.

It just fills a loophole in Enthusiast Sovereignty, so it doesn't derive many new conclusions worth examining.

Contributors

Contributors possess the legitimate right to control their own contributions. Everything in a wiki is created by contributors, so contributors naturally have the right to control the wiki. This is the natural extension of their rights over their own contributions. The basic principle of this theory is just that simple and clear.

Obviously, this theory points toward weighted voting by contribution. For example, here is a sample vote-weight formula based on MediaWiki technical characteristics, for illustrative purposes only:

Vote weight = (1 × edits + 3 × image uploads + 5 × page moves + 10 × page creations + 5 × thanks received + 200 × featured articles) + (2 × discussion posts; this is partially reflected in edit count but one could argue the average discussion post contributes more than a pure edit) + ([technical contributions, omitted because I do not understand them enough to write them]) + (3 × protections + 5 × deletions + 10 × blocks/unblocks + 20 × appointments/removals) + 1000 × founder coefficient (founding a wiki is itself the greatest contribution).

MediaWiki automatically counts edits only; it does not automatically count moves, discussion posts, blocks, etc., creating technical difficulties for the precise execution of Contributor Sovereignty. Supporters of Contributor Sovereignty might consider abandoning this precise execution and settling for something simpler, such as defining vote weight = edit count, perhaps with modifiers, such as additional weights for featured articles, administrative vote multipliers (moderator ×1.5, administrator ×2, bureaucrat ×3... I initially did not expect that I could actually find a logically self-consistent and defensible basis for such practices), or even allowing senior staff to receive a small fraction of weights of functionaries appointed by them (increasingly elitist).

One could even consider a separate technical system for this kind of institutional design: the system automatically counts creations, quality-assessment counts, blocks/unblocks; it uses a weight formula written into the system and changeable by the community through built-in voting functions to automatically calculate vote weightt; certain actions can be automatically or manually deweighted or reweighted (not counted / counted toward vote weight), such as null edits or reversed blocks being automatically deweighted (manually reweightable); edits made solely for voting rights can be manually deweighted; the right to mannually deweight and reweight could belong to a dedicated position that cannot simultaneously hold other administrative roles, and self-reweighting is prohibited; including thanks received—something representing other community members' subjective personal judgments—could lead to situations where two people (or simply one person's main account and their sockpuppet) frantically thank each other to form a faction and monopolize power; this could also be prevented through a technical system, such as limiting the frequency of thanks to the same recipient. Mutual support in featured article review is much harder and can be ignored. Such a technical system would also solve the problem of some people farming edit counts for autoconfirmed permissions (which sometimes mean voting rights) on many wikis.

As can be seen, extra voting weight can be self-sustaining and self-enhancing: major contributors can more easily use their high voting weight to elevate themselves to administrator positions; (benevolent, reasonable, non-abusive) wiki administration is also a contribution, so under Contributor Sovereignty administrators would gain higher voting weight from their (reasonable, compliant) block counts; several evil administrators could collude to infinitely raise the weight of administrative actions in the voting formula (they might sophistically argue that the ability to administer benevolently is an extremely rare talent that should be cherished and valued, etc.) to turn the wiki into an oligarchy; an evil founder could set the founder coefficient infinitely high at inception to permanently turn the wiki into their personal dictatorship. (In practice, at the early stages of a wiki's development, implementing weighted voting by contribution usually makes the wiki the founder's personal dictatorship anyway. This is a strange practice, because without introducing any political thought—including legitimacy theory and voting systems—the wiki would naturally become the founder's dictatorship; the founder does not need this method to obtain dictatorial power.)

Clearly, this is an elitist theory prone to institutionalized corruption. Supporters of Contributor Sovereignty could also attempt an Implementary Adjustment regarding institutionalized corruption. A minimal adjustment would be to mandate equal voting rights for all when voting on changes to the weight formula itself (the weight formula would naturally be a written rule or technical setting; under my own theory, changing it must require a vote; if this premise is missing, one must add a rule stating that "changing the vote-weight formula or supporting institutions" requires a vote). However, even so, the conclusions of Contributor Sovereignty are unacceptable to most people, even though its underlying logic is entirely reasonable.

Incidentally, another possible system and theory inspired by the weight formula: this legitimacy theory supports weighting by cumulative contribution, but other legitimacy theories might support weighting by contribution rate, such as limiting all the factors in the weight formula above to the past 30 days. This theory might be a crude, logically defective hybrid of Reader Sovereignty and Contributor Sovereignty, claiming that those who serve the people more, better, and faster should have more say. Why? Perhaps this is some kind of reward mechanism, but if you want a reward mechanism, why not use copyright? Wikis are places where this reward mechanism has already failed. As analyzed elsewhere, this would only reduce productivity.

Laborers

Contribution can also be expressed as labor. Contributor Sovereignty is Laborer Sovereignty. This sounds like an attack on leftist ideals, but I clarify that I intend no such thing. In fact, Enthusiast Sovereignty is more leftist than Laborer Sovereignty in a sense; explaining the reasons in depth would make the discussion too far from the topic, so let's skip it.

In the era when voting rights had property restrictions, those leftists who spoke for laborers always advocated for voting right equality, even conversely demanding dictatorship over elite capitalists (though the implementation was not necessarily stripping voting rights). Why does Laborer Sovereignty lead to such different results on a wiki? Because everyone lives in a state, spending roughly the same amount of time labor for it daily; otherwise they starve (elite capitalists, according to Laborer Sovereigntists, are the exception, reaping without laboring, and thus should be the object of dictatorship). In many states built to some degree on Laborer Sovereignty, labor is an obligation. A wiki is exactly the opposite: the micro-society is free to enter and exit, labor is unpaid, and no one is obligated to labor. Thus people contribute with vastly different levels of enthusiasm and persistence; a minority contributes or monopolizes the majority of labor. Thus Laborer Sovereignty, formally identical, produces different results because of the different natures of the state and the wiki.

However, even if these two Laborer Sovereignties are formally identical, they are not absolutely bound. Laborers may have the right to control the fruits of their labor; generally, they do not voluntarily abandon these rights and hand over their labor fruits to others, and since everything in state society is created by laborers, the state belongs to laborers. But on a wiki, this abandonment of rights is actually already happening. Copyright is the representative of labor ownership, and the CC license even explicitly states that this abandonment of rights is irrevocable. This reveals that contributors can decide to irrevocably authorize readers, transfer sovereignty to readers, and devote themselves to readers. In a state, workers refuse this "devotion"; in a wiki, contributors choose such devotion. Because in a state, the object of "devotion" is a minority, the devotees are the majority, and "devotion" reduces overall social welfare; in a wiki, the object of devotion is the majority, the devotees are the minority, and devotion increases overall social welfare. This devotion is a voluntary, selfless, noble act. At the same time, we have already seen the consequences of refusing this devotion.

Compared to Enthusiaists Sovereignty, Laborer Sovereignty is easier to think of for uprisers to abusive admins when they want to put forward their own democratic theory to counterattack admins' dictatorial/oligarchic nosense—especially when the uprisers are members of a Labor Party. The anti-abuse declaration of Skywiki quoted above echoes this theory ("the very large amount of unpaid labor put into the platform by tech and community volunteers"). Clarifying the potential consequences it may bring and providing an alternative solution are important for these uprisers.

Discussants

Decision-making power naturally belongs to the decision-makers: it belongs to those who (truly) want it (not using it as a tool for private gain—for example, people who never participate in discussion but suddenly self-nominate frantically when there is a chance to be nominated as an administrator candidate), that is, those who do not abandon it, that is, everyone. Non-discussants have voluntarily abandoned their rights, i.e., accepted the exercise of power. The legitimacy of power is based on the voluntary acceptance of the authorized.

This theory takes voluntary acceptance as the foundation of "power," carrying anarchist hues, and cannot provide legitimacy for power over dissenters among discussants. And this is precisely what people care about. If one questions Discussant Sovereigntists, they can probably only stammer out something about the right to leave. This argument is far too weak.

This theory is not worth examining in detail.