Wikianarchism
- Community
- Anti-wiki
- Conflict-driven view
- False community
- Wikiculture
- Wikifaith
- The Wiki process
- The wiki way
- Darwikinism
- Power structure
- Wikianarchism
- Wikibureaucracy
- Wikidemocratism
- WikiDemocracy
- Wikidespotism
- Wikifederalism
- Wikihierarchism
- Wikimeritocracy
- Wikindividualism
- Wikioligarchism
- Wikiplutocracy
- Wikirepublicanism
- Wikiscepticism
- Wikitechnocracy
- Collaboration
- Antifactionalism
- Factionalism
- Social
- Exopedianism
- Mesopedianism
- Metapedianism
- Overall content structure
- Transclusionism
- Antitransclusionism
- Categorism
- Structurism
- Encyclopedia standards
- Deletionism
- Delusionism
- Exclusionism
- Inclusionism
- Precisionism
- Precision-Skeptics
- Notability
- Essentialism
- Incrementalism
- Article length
- Mergism
- Separatism
- Measuring accuracy
- Eventualism
- Immediatism
- Miscellaneous
- Antiovertranswikism
- Mediawikianism
- Post-Deletionism
- Transwikism
- Wikidynamism
- Wikisecessionism
- Redirectionism
Wikianarchism is a tag given (often as parody) to the suggestion, as advanced by some Wikipedians, that all restrictions on non-sysop users should be relaxed.
The term Wikianarchist is also sometimes used to describe the Wikipedians who advocate Wikianarchism.
The term Wikianarchy refers to the system of social organization of Wikipedia (and other related Wikimedia projects) promoted by them.
Pros
Basically the wikianarchy is a form of collective but chaotic self-organization, based on many individual efforts, possibly by any small group focusing specific interests with their own goals, and the possibility of multiplying competing efforts in parallel, coexisting but diverging directions (not necessarily based on consensus, which is hard or impossible to reach on a really open project), as a valid way to sustain the goal of neutral point of view.
To rich this goal of openness, a wider choice of options would be available, and any one could extend them easily, but without necessarily searching first a global common interest or any intent to develop a personal fame from its initiator, letting everyone adopt or reject the individual point of view totally or partially, and even allowing them to change their mind and goals at any time without prior agreement with others (i.e. reducing the community policies and guidelines to the strict minimum required by enforcable laws or by technical limits, and even eliminating the goals of quality which is hard to assess, and other superficial goals such as required formats or presentations).
Cooperation between users would no longer be a goal, just a possibility. Merits of individual users should not offer them any advantage in terms of possibilities. No efforts should be planned with restrictive timeframes of validity, there would be no required personal involvement for the efforts they initiated themselves. Community votes would not only be unnecessary, they would be completely ignored without any enforcable effect against any one.
Cons
The major drawback of this approach is that a true wikianarchy would allow anyone to use collective resources without any limitation, and even waste them as they want, considering that these resources have no cost and are unlimited. It would work only if all participants have a good will and are trying to help others or get help from others, so using their own rensposability to gain some respectability by respecting other participants. Otherwise the wikis will just be waste disposal areas, nothing would be recycled, and very rapidly all resources would be used and the playground would stop having any use for anyone, even for the initial participants that wasted these resources and that have no more use for themselves or anyone else.
Such anarchic system could require that each participant to cleanup their own wastes and recycle them or review them often, or it would force the project to perform automatic cleanup of all contents, starting by the creations that have not been used since the longest time. It would be impossible to preserve any content for long term, because of the total absence of any quality criteria for selecting what needs to be kept: wikis would just become unmoderated chatrooms with unlimited number of participants.
But the total absense of moderation would rapidly create a system overwhelmed by automated posts filling up the collective spaces with junk data, and using lot of resources on servers, so the response time would rapidly degrade for every one (even if a maximum usage of resources per participant is set), or the system would simply crash.
Wikis would then be forced to become only collections of short-lived isolated sandboxes, without any stable links between each other: all participants would be isolated in their own personal sandbox (suppressing all collective spaces), any interaction between users would become impossible (including talks), cooperation between participants would then become almost impossible (except for instant messaging), and every contribution made for personal use only would also be rapidly forgotten, for lack of storage space.
Wikis would no longer be wikis (just a set of strange single-user chatrooms, with a complex syntax that no one would use for their personal use). And who would ever want to finance and maintain the servers online just to allow others to waste instantly want was donated, if there's no benefit returned to any one, and no possibility to get help from others? All servers would be turned off. The service would disappear totally, completely forgotten just like all their contents which were never hosted reliably, except for very short time.