Charles Matthews wrote:
Surreptitiousness wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 1:16 PM,
Surreptitiousness
<surreptitious.wikipedian(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
Hmmm. To do that I suppose you would have to
create some rules on who
can run. Maybe bar admins from running for starters, that might reduce
the risk of arbcom siding with admins. I don't think the community would
allow Jimmy to appoint as he sees fit anymore, but if the board mandated
a couple of seats had to be reserved fro picks, that might shake things
up. That would involve the board getting down in the mud though, which
they try not to do.
You can't just throw out a possible new arbcom membership
requirement
without considering the effects.
You can't? Is this why nothing ever changes? People are too scared too
propose anything radical?
We're not short of proposals, usually.
Having just nullified a load
of inactive proposals, I can attest to
that. I was wondering if there was a better way to organise historical
and rejected proposals, but after a moment's thought I filed it away as
too much work for too little return.
Progress could be made with
further functions being split off, in the way that ban appeals are now a
subcommittee function. There is no particular reason why socking or
civility cases shouldn't be handled in this fashion, where the evidence
is clear-cut enough (the usual case).
I actually thought socking was devolved to
the community through
Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations and Wikipedia:Sock puppetry.
Civility is harder to quantify. The community clearly feels it si an
important policy, there was a recent RFC which stood behind it. I think
there's a rewrite under-way regarding the policy itself. I'd certainly
welcome a civility board though as a move forwards.
The kind of radical change people
don't want to see is from something monolithic that works (despite
grumbling) to something else equally monolithic that is a complete step
in the dark and unknown quantity. And don't forget that proposals have
been howled down, in living memory - at least if you take a pile-on of a
dozen people to be an expression of public opinion.
Having invested a large amount of time on a howled down proposal,
WP:ATT, I need no reminder of that. I tried to poke some sort of life
back into the Wikipedia:Advisory Council on Project Development but it
didn;t come to aught. I think that one is going to die, no-one wants to
take it forwards.