Talk:Emerging strategic priorities/ESP 3 key questions/How can we prevent opinion cartels?

From Strategic Planning
    • Document the opinion cartels. A warning in the header of a talk page could document points of view that had to be trimmed in the past. --Fasten (Wikinews: Aktion Deutschland Hilft asks for donations after the earthquake in Indonesia) 18:58, 21 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • How about a black words list for commonly attacked pages, if the cartel uses common phrases in their attacks on the page, you put them in the black words list, and the edit filter for that page checks and flags every edit that includes those words. A recent example in Wikiversity was an opinion cartel that always used a phrase unban XXXX in their attacks. It is impossible to tell for sure whether the postings were made by a cartel or by the banned member under multiple sign-ons. But the very consistency of their attacks, means that during submission of the edit process, a filter could detect and flag the page.--Graeme E. Smith 13:51, 22 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Don't let people game the policy on canvassing. Right now it's against the rules to recruit a bunch of people with a shared viewpoint to a major content or policy debate. But it isn't *technically* against the rules to recruit those people to a WikiProject or Group or Template, and then link those pages to debates.
  3. Neutralize their power. It's one thing if an "opinion cartel" is there to engage in honest consensus building, and they often help reach a consensus. But if they repeatedly show up to a debate to stonewall and prevent a solution, there has to be a way to break the deadlock. Perhaps ArbCom needs the power to settle these disputes. Not by declaring the position that Wikipedia should take, but they should AT LEAST be able to identify the "filibuster" position of the cartel, and declare this position completely unacceptable. Force them off of the extreme flank.
  4. Agreed. An opinion cartel is at its most destructive when they filibuster efforts to find a consensus. Imagine that you have Israelis and Palestinians who want to achieve peace. But suddenly the peace process is joined by an extremist group who wants to blow everyone up, and declares the consensus-building process a sell out. The dispute will never end, and you will see reasonable people give up, out of frustration. We have to fix our dispute resolution systems, or add new "final solutions" that reduce the chances of a filibuster. (e.g.: admin-only discussions, arbitrators who are there to force a settlement, some kind of run-off voting system, or representative negotiation).
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