An adaptation of Polis for the Wikimedia ecosystem, currently a live prototype. This post continues after ‘We need to innovate with Wikimedia decision-making‘. This prototype is part of the Next25 initiative attempt to arrive at more constructive attitude towards decision making.
We have a lot of decisions to make in the next year in our movement. As the number of visitors to Wikipedia is dropping, the internet around us is changing rapidly. This means that as a movement, we will have some hard decisions to make where we go. As WMF Executive Director Bernadette Meehan summarized: we need to evolve, but in ways that strengthen our mission.
As I laid out in my last post, we need better processes to make decisions than the Request for Comments. This is true for deciding on our outdated policies in our many communities (how do we welcome new contributors, how do we handle AI, what is the bureaucracy that we can handle as a less-active community?) and on directions for our movement (what should be our priorities? Are there opportunities for new projects? What technology should we develop, and what should it look like?).
Today, I would like to introduce one prototype that could play a role in a more constructive approach to making decisions.
Often, our current mechanisms focus on a single, large-form proposal, bringing out our critical thinking. There are many ways to improve our decision making, and I would like to see this as a part of a larger effort to experiment with that. Don’t assume that a single process can serve is in every decision, but rather pick the tool that fits the task.
In my last post, I outlined some recommendations for how we could improve our processes. None of this is hypothetical. The civic-tech world has spent the last decade building and testing exactly these ideas — most famously in Taiwan, where the vTaiwan process used a tool called Polis to find unexpected common ground on regulating Uber.
How it works
This brings me to the prototype we have been working on: Proto, an adaptation of Polis for the Wikimedia ecosystem, running on Toolforge with your regular Wikimedia login. Polis (for example: pol.is) is a well-known innovation that has been used in many citizen engagements, including vTaiwan. We have built on top of it to make it fit a wiki’s needs better: to be more encouraging about editing the statements, and to add argument mapping.
The process consists of three phases:
- Respond to atomic statements and find the statements that the community already agrees on, and the ones that divide.
- Collect relevant arguments for the most important statements.
- Collect an informed opinion mapping by showing the most important statements with their selected arguments.
Separate the phases
A system like Proto can be used to collect valuable input on a complex topic, before solidifying a draft. The phase separation gives ideation, refinement, and preference measurement each their own home. With the outcomes of this process, you could organize a more informed voting process on-wiki.
Make participation accessible (atomic statements)
The core mechanic is deliberately simple. A conversation (for example, a new policy dealing with blocking temporary accounts) starts with a question and a set of short, atomic statements — one claim each (“A temporary account should be warned at least once before being blocked for vandalism”).
Participants respond agree, disagree, or pass on each statement, and can submit statements of their own: to improve the phrasing of existing statements, or to fill a gap. That’s the whole interaction: no threads, no replies, no walls of text to catch up on. Joining a conversation on day twelve is exactly as easy as joining on day one; if you return later, you simply weigh in on whatever new statements have appeared since. Rapid responding make it easier to participate.
Notably, the same design serves both ends of the scale: a small group gets an honest reading of the people it could never get to write talk page comments, while a large wiki gets a way to digest thousands of voices that no closer could. And the process is composable — an organizer can stop after the opinion mapping and already walk away with something valuable.
(A practical challenge will be how to connect the process to the wiki – notifications and talk page messages are likely the best bet.)
Decouple opinions from identity
Behind the scenes, the responses build an opinion map. Statistical clustering reveals the groups of participants who tend to respond alike — and, more importantly, the statements that are supported across those groups. Instead of amplifying the sharpest disagreement the way a threaded discussion does, the system is designed to surface hidden consensus.
Your response is private while the conversation runs; opinions become visible as clusters, not as named individuals to follow or oppose. A faction that shows up to swing the outcome doesn’t silently shift a headcount — it appears on the map as exactly what it is. Private responses remove herding and anchoring — and let people disagree with the regulars without it becoming personal.
Collect the arguments
Where Proto goes beyond standard Polis is in what happens after the opinion mapping. The organizer can curate a small set of the most informative statements — the points of strong consensus and the genuine fault lines — and open an argument layer: participants write and rank short pro and con arguments for each featured statement. No threading here either; just the community’s best reasoning on both sides, sorted by usefulness.
And as an optional final phase, an informed opinion poll: a fresh round on just the featured statements, with the strongest arguments displayed alongside. Comparing the before and after even lets us see whether exposure to arguments actually changed minds — something our current processes are incapable of measuring. Rather than just focusing on whether we like the proposal, consider also what others might think of as relevant arguments.
One thing Proto deliberately is not: a vote. While everything may feel like voting, it is much more about mapping where the agreement and disagreement are, and collecting arguments in an equitable manner. From there, we have a solid foundation to draft policies from, and to figure out how to compromise between the views on the table. It may also expose where more conversation is needed, and where we already agree and only a vocal minority pushes back. The report from the tool is meant to inform the final step of the policy process on-wiki — because at that point, a Request for Comments or an opinion poll may actually make sense.
An invitation
This is one way of doing consent-building differently, but the underlying principles stay the same. I would invite you to try it, and to think about it from a constructive perspective: how would you improve it? Let us know, on metawiki.
The prototype is live at proto.wiki , and what it needs now is reality: some groups willing to run a real consultation on a real question. If your wiki, WikiProject, or group has a policy discussion that has been stuck for years — and whose hasn’t? — I would love to talk.
Twenty-five years ago we built an encyclopedia. I refuse to believe that the way we made decisions in 2004 is the best we can do in 2026. The editors who join us next year deserve rules they can actually read, trust — and change.
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