Political dispute

A political dispute is one which has been the subject of serious debate at the political level (even as low as municipal, regional, inter-ethnic) somewhere in the world. It is something which simply cannot be resolved by reducing it to mere neutrality dispute, terminology dispute or identity disputes. Several interlinked disputes may have become aggravated by history and current violence to the point where there are, simply, opposing views on the matter.

One way to deal with this is explicit factions and some tendency system to represent the views explicitly, so that they do not become unstated or assumed in articles. Another way is by technical means, which is not advisable although for Consumerium it may be useful for that content which is propagated widely into the Consumerium buying signal. It is definitely NOT advisable to have the same people who adjudicate the dispute be those wielding technical powers, for the same reasons cops are not appointed as judges. So it's the latest neutral editor approved version that would be required, and that person must be from a faction neutral on the issue and with no tendency on it. According to others, not according to themselves.

However, probably every dispute at Consumerium is ultimately political or an identity dispute that is even more sensitive. In general we must rely on other essential projects to tell us what is real and what is going on.

When political disputes arise in the content wiki there is probably a way to resolve them for purposes of the Consumerium buying signal. However, this will not usually resolve settling the issue for more than a fixed period of time, after which it should be revisited. No decision made on any political dispute should probably stand for more than a year, without being so revisited.

Avoiding Wikipedia's path

Wikipedia has a long history of dealing very badly with political disputes. It seems that a certain degree of controversy at the academic or terminology level is dealt with very well through their process, because there are some external referents they can trust, like dictionaries or academic fields or even google counts. As soon as one questions however the balance of power on the net, or invokes an issue where one group is under-represented (there are vastly more Zionist-inclined Jews on Wikipedia for instance than there are Islamist Arabs), the sysop power structure very strongly favours the over-represented group. Just as blacks do not get much fairness from an all-white police force - this is the worst systemic bias issue and it is compounded by various kinds of systematic bias which favour those who have "friends in power".

w:Wikipedia:political dispute had a detailed analysis of this issue and various ways to resolve such issues in large public wikis. It could have served as a "straw man" for debate about a similar policy at Consumerium. It was deleted by advocates of a w:carceral state who wish no capacity for a political challenge to their actions. So as not to enable them further with any guide to political action, this will not be reposted either to Wikipedia or here as long as any "Wikipedians" who exercise sysop or developer powers participate at Consumerium. There is no excuse for denying that political disputes exist or are separate from any other type of nonviolent dispute or more specialized dispute. They do, and they are, and denial that they do, or are, is like saying that everyone must accept the same politics from the same master... which of course is the Wikipedia way, if not the "wiki way".

The 'once and for all' decision structure propagated by GodKings such as and Wikipedia are both anti-political and anti-democratic in nature. There is no excuse for such a structure at Consumerium, it would invite a democratize or destroy decision almost by definition, if someone were to usurp that power (to resolve a political dispute unilaterally). Trolls, certainly, would become totally hostile, and would begin to work to destroy Consumerium.

This would be of course itself a political dispute, but more than that, a much deeper dispute about whether one can co-operate with those who are hostile to the whole notion of a dispute being political, as opposed to "personal".

Apologies to those uninterested in Wikipedia - see Talk:Political dispute for more details on the context and motives of the deleter of the policy noted.

Two power structures

The real world way to ensure that political disputes do not bias administrative decisions in such a way as to sabotage the purposes of the administration itself is to separate judicial and police power. For these reasons trolls tend to advocate the strict separation of the sysop power structure from any kind of editorial or oversight power structure that would respond to real world issues. This latter would be like judge, while sysops would be more like cops - making short term decisions that are easily over-ruled by anyone at all, with or without sysop power. Sysops may simply have the power to do more things at one time. For instance they might be able to auto-revert all edits from one IP or IP range with a standard explanation. If it is overly broad or wrongly stated, anyone could revert the revert, noting the sysop was wrong or hasty. So even one good edit in a pack of vandalism from an IP range might be saved, although use of this feature to block-revert an entire C block say would be something few people should ever imagine using. But the ability to overrule this would be within everyone's grasp, and perhaps the whole block-edit could be reverted even by non-sysops. That would better distribute the police power.

To distribute the judicial power, of course, a democratic structure based on a general acceptability to all factions (i.e. they will continue to participate and not fight a civil war even if person X gets a judgeship, as long as person Y also gets one, and power balances let them offset each other), and of course frequent rotations of responsibilities and withdrawal of any judge from an issue where they are biased, would probably also be required.

This is the best pre-emptive way to deal with a political dispute. Tactics to deal with them without such a structure as noted above are basically futile if the sysop power structure is the power structure. In that case one has simple "rule by cops" and that is the definition of a w:carceral state.