Anarchopedia:en:sysops
In this moment all (registered) users on Anarchopedia are sysops. In the sense of anarchism and Anarchopedia, sysop is maintainer, not authority.
Even Anarchopedia is small and doesn't have more then ten contributors (2004/10/03), contributors have very meta question: Who can believe that even the founder is not authoritarian or that he doesn't have some other thoughts in his mind which are opposed to principles of anarchism and declared principles of Anarchopedia? Maybe it is possible to guess/know after some time of colaborative work, but it is not at the beginning.
I (Millosh) have dificult position as founder and the only maintainer of the operating system where Anarchopedia exists. (The position would be very good if the projcet is based on hierarchical relations, but...) So, I want to find the model: how can we organize our work. I have some very basic ideas, but I release that all of them may have a big problems:
- The simplest and ethicly the clearest way is to: (1) give sysop permissions to all of contributors; (2) move Anarchopedia to some server where all contributors can have admin permissions on the operating system; (3) find some (direct democratic) way for administration of the Internet domain(s).
- Problem is: How can we know that all of contributors want good to Anarchopedia?
- The second way is to give all of that only to the group of people who have my (or each other) confidence. The main problem of this model is potentially creation of oligarchy or leninist "revolutionary vanguard". We don't want nor oligarchy nor revolutionary vanguard.
- The third way is to keep all of permissions to myself as "keeper" of Anarchopedia. But, this is de facto enlightened absolutism, which is opposite to anarchist principles.
I understand that we can find some kind of model which would be the nearest to the second choice (with bigger group of mainainers) and with... Actually, if we are talking only about sysop privileges on Anarchopedia, solution is simple: All of contributors will have sysop permissions (if the persion is destructive, taking permissions back is not the problem). We need to find solution "only" for the last two question.
Ideas about organization of Anarchopedia
Please, let's talk about two questions: (1) control of servers where Anarchopedia exists and (2) control of Anarchopedia's domains (anarchopedia.org, anarchopedia.net, anarchopedia.info; about AnarchApedia females should talk there.
Troll perspective
Infrastructure owner's trust is the only reason most sysop power structures have any power at all. Whoever "owns the computers and the domain name" chooses personal friends to exercise arbitrary power over everyone else.
On Anarchopedia:Itself, we hope that the infrastructure owners will be committed to keeping Anarchopedia:Policy and even who Anarchopedia:We are open to constant challenge and edit. The New Troll point of view and Anarchopedia:Lowest Troll ideologies suggest that outsiders must have more power than insiders. So maybe you get powers until you abuse them, but then lose them VERY quickly and find it almost impossible to get them back, since, new volunteers will be getting them first? or something like that.
On most wikis, the term "sysops" is equivalent to power structure. This is because the sysops manage (control) the wiki. On Anarchopedia, the sysops should be limited to Anarchopedia:Cleaning duties, such as defending against Anarchopedia:Vandalism. Hence, on Anarchopedia, it is hoped that sysops will not be a power structure. This will require eternal vigiliance and permanent revolution on behalf of the user base, and if a power structure begins to emerge, the users will take their content and move elsewhere. Of course, the ideal would be to have no sysops, but this would leave Anarchopedia open to vandalism.
Anarchopedia:Trolls in general must agree that control of servers or domain names isn't that important, and it's very different to answer questions about developers and net admins than it is to answer questions about web admins like the sysops. Control on servers or domains is almost worthless if the GFDL corpus or some other free documentation license lets a new web service be set up easily, and googling for certain keywords lets you easily find it.
By contrast, insidious abuse of sysop powers (sysop vandalism) is much worse, because it prevents the actual GFDL corpus from being corrected, and may not even be noticed for a long time. Even sysop vigilantiism is not as bad as that vandalism, since social exclusion of some Anarchopedia:Faction can just cause it to go somewhere else: as with Wikipedia factions, many of which left early to do something else. So controls on sysop vandalism are highest priority, as with all other vandalism - the only reason to need any kind of sysop.
Ask for permissions
All logged-in users have sysop access.
