Proposal:End of the democracy game or downfall
Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.
Edit this page to help identify the priorities related to this proposal!
- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content
- Increase Participation
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
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Original in German: Ende des Demokratiespiels oder Untergang
Summary
If the users are not going to stop "playing democracy" and the behaviour of seeking one's own profit — usually at the expense of others — and if they are not going to return to a more serious way of communicating and working on the project, the German Wikipedia will fail without a doubt. Since the German Wikipedia is a flagship of the non-English editions, this scenario would be a fatal sign for the rest of the project.
Proposal
If people continue their mission of enforcing opinions by all means and if they hide this aim behind an alleged understanding of democracy, the project will only be able to fail. Just currently, a minority of users is sabotaging the German Wikipedia in this way. This is frustrating and takes away potential, time and patience from real contributors. From now on, every person not willing to contribute substantially to the original project aims will have to be taken from the project. Wikipedia needs higher quality standards and it needs to apply them. We have to focus on the reader: in the first line, pupils and university students who are using Wikipedia for their education. This involves responsibility. Within the project, that is, in the articles which we have to keep on a certain level of quality, as well as beyond it by explaining its possibilities and limits. If quality rises significantly, the barriers that keep university graduates from contributing will fall. In some fields, this has already happened.
Motivation
Key Questions
- What is important for us? Is it really still creating an encyclopedia, or is it doing big politics and social networking?
- Minorities continue to walk all over the majority, are vetoing minorities really allowed to overrule the opinion of the majority??
- How do we get more professionals into the project?
Potential Costs
Initially none. At the end, maybe we will pay the travel expenses for people who teach the right use of Wikipedia at universities, schools, education institutes etc.
References
Community Discussion
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