Quality Control requires control by independent inspectors

Fragment of a discussion from Talk:May 2011 Update

Who inspects the inspectors?

Tgeorgescu15:29, 12 June 2011

Each individual inspector could be issued demerits, by other inspectors, for improper conduct. It would take some months to determine what the types of conduct problems would be, and how many demerits, such as 100 points for a 3RR sequence of 3 reverts to other changes in a 24-hour period. Admins would have less power, on a daily basis, as merely issuing demerits or adding the opposite merits points, and so blocking of users would be relatively rare. Also, to reduce gangs, inspectors could volunteer into inspector pools, as inspector juries to be assigned, at random, within various topic areas they like. Only some inspectors, from a "physics pool" would be assigned to judge the quality of article "w:Isaac Newton" during the current quality period. I think inspectors should get mandatory 3-month time-outs from articles, just as the editors would be denied talk-page edits to an article for 3 months, once their 6-month? domination limit had expired. Private discussions could be encouraged, using outside email accounts, to debate issues without people being "shown wrong" in talk-pages viewed by thousands. A lot more chit-chat hashing of issues could be promotedly, without clogging the servers, if outside email/IM were used more. Being chosen from random pools, there would be less chance that inspectors were the current POV-pushing w:WP:OWNers of the articles.

Meanwhile, I think the idea of new editors joining a welcome-team would scare away many would-be troublemakers, so the current blocking of corporate-gogetters would be reduced, as they would quickly leave once they knew their company products were off-limit articles. Also, outside inspectors could monitor how many users were getting demerits within certain welcome-teams, and perhaps the "top-ten most demeriting" teams could be checked for overly-hostile treatment of other editors. By "quantifying" disagreements as edit-war demerits, or name-slur demerits, rather than capricious blocks, at the whim of irritated admins, then patterns of conflicts could be better spotted as patterns in the numbers assigned to editors (and articles) in each team. Once the quality of articles is quantified as specific quality metrics (number of words, number of grammar errors, number of prepositions, number of footnotes, etc.), and the quality of user actions is quantified by adverse demerits or rewarded merits, then the system would begin to reveal obvious patterns in the numbers being measured about those qualities.

BOTTOMLINE: Quality control requires control, but such control should be randomized from pools of interested users, where editors could no longer just gang-up on a particular article because they have buddies to force their POV onto the article. Hence, an organized system of measuring article qualities and user-action qualities would be instituted to replace the current winners-take-all games which play "keep-away" with articles, where new editors are denied from making the changes.

Wikid7710:43, 24 June 2011

The idea is that admins do such sort of jobs, and inspectors would be placed above the admins. Now, there are not many admins, and the things would get excessively complicated in order to pamper the users who cannot adapt to the Wikipedia editing climate. You ignore how much work have to do the people who check the recent changes. They do not seek to bully others, but simply keep the articles free from spam, rants, vandalism, fringe theories, racism, insults, libel and so on. Wikipedia articles would degrade considerably in several days if these people would not do their job. Wikipedia has clear policies about what can be added or removed from the articles and has arbitration committees and mediation procedures. These should be enough to any person who is prepared to abide by the rules.

Tgeorgescu20:09, 25 July 2011