Consumerium Process

Revision as of 22:02, 21 March 2004 by 142.177.106.10 (talk) (making clear how the process works, incorporating stuff from talk (but not all of it, also Talk:Development Wiki lays out some process assumptions)
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Consumerium Process is about how information flows from Noise Wiki to Signal Wiki, how it is arranged, perhaps into Intermediate pages to provide for automatic aggregation into the Consumerium buying signal and information aggregartion and collation according to each consumer's preferences

troll friendly especially for cases of identity dispute
mostly managed by faction, and concerned to get all views out and be fair
trying to avoid a permission-based model and work on fast revert only
there might be some limits on visible edits for new users and etc., but in general these will be removed as more and more users begin to participate
only logged in users of repute are allowed to edit (whitelist) and their edits are always instantly visible but very restricted - typically only pass/fail or removal of assertions or unverifiable facts; this should be considered a "final edit for publishing" and using this access to totally rewrite things is simply a breach of faith
further restriction based measures will be adopted to provide for stability, such as bonded users, verified users (real identity known and checked) vs. normal users (may be normal pseudonyms, real but unverified names, and some shared pseudonyms for troll factions); Some rules and interwiki identity standard will apply at least informally to rule out deliberately confusing name choices
collective identities of organizations or groups could also be bonded or verified in some cases, these might look to others as an individual user but will have a name that makes it obvious that there is some factionally defined system of agreeing on edits, votes and bets they make

There's a necessity to innovate and to make it easy for groups to raise their objections without necessarily tying them to any single identity although the single name makes it easy to avoid identity disputes. This will matter in legal situations especially.

See also the discussion page for previous discussion on Consumerium Process and an attempt to predict its flow

Our assumption is that many worst cases can be avoided by the above structure:

1. Anonymous trolls dump unreliable crap data ("noise") into the Research Wiki claiming it has excellent credentials and is true beyond reasonable doubt. Actual "researchers" investigate these claims to the best of their ability, trying to be polite, and refine this "noise" into Consumerium:intermediate pages that they sign and somehow stake something on so we know they believe it. The noise and quality must co-exist in the same wiki, this is where it gets sorted out.

1a. Campaigns can be debated or disputed in this same wiki but are not edited there. A separate Opinion Wiki function is essential to the generating the Consumerium buying signal. Things that campaigns claim are true should be fact-checked, like any other research. So there's an argument to require them to encounter "the other side", i.e. opposing factions, fairly early. Though, for a campaign to be effective, it would have to be able to propagate its own idea of its message into the Signal Wiki, so, probably, it has a presence in both of these. One can think of it as somewhat higher integrity advertising, perhaps. Besides, the Campaign is just another bonded user entity that can sign a page, so:

2. Signed pages are assumed correct by default. But because this information is not factually reliable, and there might be serious implications of releasing it, it goes through a final stage at the Signal Wiki where the Consumerium Governance Organization makes its standard disclaimers and if necessary edits out stuff that it can't release, perhaps per country. We don't say that anything is necessarily a "fact", for legal reasons. What is guaranteed is only that the Consumerium Process itself has been followed.

2a. The difference between Campaign and not, might be, a campaign signal must be passed or failed as a whole, and cannot be edited. While one can edit a non-campaign signal to remove controversial statements, this is a big bet with respect to a campaign that might exist simply to make such statements.

2b. Advertising for green light products would work on the same grounds, and we might be able to charge for those to make the whole healthy signal infrastructure self-funding. Just one of many ideas to make us less dependent on volunteer labour, which always comes with biases.

3. Every problem ends up back at this Development Wiki where more trolls gnaw on it. See also Talk:Development Wiki for more on this.