Items Not Yet Ready For PrimeTime Scholarly Review on Wikiversity   As you may know KillerChihuahau summarily baleeted these essays from the pages of Wikiversity presumably because she disagrees with the notion of using the donorfunded site to educate st Century youth in modern concepts of ethical organizational management Moulton    Abolishing the Wikipedia Bans As a Governance Tool   The following article originally appeared as an addon comment in the PP Foundations blog Michael Bauwens the editor of the site elevated the comment to a main article in its own right  The governance model of Wikipedia was so anachronistic that it took me over a year to place it in the timeline of historic governance models adopted at various times in the annals of human history  The thing that stymied me was the prominence of blocking and banning as the primary tool of governance I simply couldnt place that among the recognized tools of governance in any historic context  And then I happened to take a look at the oldest surviving account of secular law  the Code of Hammurabi of  BC  Of the  laws that Hammurabi of Mesopotamia carved into the stone tablets take note of the very first one   If any one ensnare another putting a ban upon him but he can not prove it then he that ensnared him shall be put to death  Evidently banning ostracism was a common practice in the tribal cultures in the Middle East some  years ago at the dawn of civilization Capricious and spurious banning was evidently such a common and egregious abuse of tribal overlords that Hammurabi made it a capital offense to ban someone without proving just cause  And yet on Wikipedia indefinite blocks and bans without due process are a common occurrence That is to say the prevailing governance model of Wikipedia corresponds to a preHammurabic tribal ochlocracy that is so anachronistic it predates the advent of the Rule of Law  When Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders drafted the US Constitution one of the provisions they put in Article One was a prohibition against Bills of Attainder A Bill of Attainder is the technical term in the law for declaring a person to be an outlaw without respect to having violated any specific law that applies equally to everyone The Founders excluded Bills of Attainder from the tools of governance because  years of political history had demonstrated that such a toxic practice is corrosive and ridden with corruption and invariably sinks any government that comes to rely on it  The irony here is that Wikipedia purports to be the sum of all knowledge with an educational mission that reaches out to students teachers and scholars around the world And yet those exercising power in Wikipedia have not yet learned the oldest and most profound lessons in the annals of human history  lessons enshrined in the first written law and in the first article of the US Constitution  The consequence of adopting such an anachronistic governance model is that Wikipedians are fated to relive and reify the longforgotten lessons of history They relive those lessons by reprising the same kind of political dramas that fill the history books since the dawn of civilization  The anachronistic governance model which Jimbo Wales foolishly and mindlessly introjected into Wikipedia is simply not a sustainable model in this day and age Summary and capricious banning wasnt even a sustainable model some  years ago when Hammurabi first singled it out as an unacceptable practice in a civilized culture  So what to do about it The answer can be found in the second law of Hammurabis Code As Hammurabi advises the solution is to tell them to go jump in the lake  Or as they say in Yiddish Nem zich a vaneh  Further comments by readers of the PP Foundation may be found here Additional comments by participants of Wikipedia Review may be found here    Rules Games and Dramas   For thousands of years monarchs politicians and organizational managers have sought to construct the ideal set of rules so as to achieve an orderly stable wellregulated system This notion is subsumed under the popular meme Law and Order  Rules are also used to define games Most games think of Chess Checkers or Go have very few rules which are easy to learn easy to remember and easy to abide by  Given a set of rules which define a game there is a branch of applied mathematics called Game Theory which studies the optimal strategy for playing any given game  Some years ago there was a movie called Colossus The Forbin Project that revolved around a computer simulation game called Global Thermonuclear War That cinematic parable drawn from a key insight in Game Theory was followed by a similar thriller called War Games  For the past decade one of the most popular franchises on American television has been NBCs Law and Order The endless syndicated reruns can be watched almost any night on the TNT Cable Channel where the advertising slogan is We Know Drama  The point of all this of course is to note that ruledriven systems are not inherently orderly stable and predictable Rather they are the recipe for games and dramas Mathematicians have known for over a century that ruledriven systems are mathematically chaotic Within the broad scope of Chaos Theory the branches subsuming Game Theory and Drama Theory are probably of most interest to the general public who lap up games and dramas along with copious amounts of beer and popcorn  Now mathematicians will tell you that its also possible to design orderly stable predictable and wellbehaved systems if thats what you really want But the solution is not to be found in any set of rules Rather if one wants a highly functional system that operates gracefully and with minimum of suspenseful drama one must evolve beyond mere rules and embrace the subtle mathematics of functions  This is not likely to happen in my lifetime At least not among Homo Schleppians most of whom are hopelessly mathimpaired  If I were running Wikipedia Id go with a set of rules that intentionally maximized the dramaturgy Its clear that Wikipedians crave heartpounding knucklebiting psychodrama and they might as well admit that and design their system to become the premier site for liveaction postmodern scandalridden theater of the absurd  Barsoom Tork