John Lee wrote:
What's the question? If the question is,
"What authority does Jimbo have?"
the answer is spelled out quite clearly: "He has no authority beyond that
which he has been granted implicitly through the trust of the community."
And I ask for no more. We have a set of longstanding traditions about
how things are done, and I think that for the most part, these
traditions are workable and useful.
I think that I serve a useful role in, for example, this situation with
WP:ATT. A major policy restructuring took place in a way that a huge
number of very active and high quality editors were not consulted. I
view my role in Wikipedia as being primarily about the defense of the
broad community and "rule of law" rather than being about any particular
policy or faction. (Outside of certain things that I think are
foundational and beyond question and non-negotiable like NPOV.)
People tend to get very agitated from time to time. And then we tend to
calm down and talk things over and people see that I am hardly the
raging lunatic that at least some people seem to think. I like to move
slowly and thoughtfully, and I like for the community to move slowly and
thoughtfully.
If the community ever seeks to depose me from my special role, I hope
that this will happen via a thoughtful process, but I actually think it
is completely unnecessary. It is my intention to fade into a purely
symbolic position over time.
In a case like the present one, there is actually no really good answer
about how policy shifts become official. In the case of 3RR, we had an
excellent approach... a broad disucssion, a community vote, and then my
personal certification that policy had changed. This led to a clear and
definable policy shift, without a wheel war or factions fighting endlessly.
Such orderly processes are beneficial, but we have not designed them in
all cases.
In the current case, it looks like the right way forward is exactly the
3RR way. A broad community discussion to shed light on the very good
work done by a group of people laboring away on WP:ATT and related
pages, and then a poll to assess the feelings of the community as best
we can, and then we can have a final certification of the results.
In the future, such a process should be made more formalized I think (as
we get bigger and bigger, it is harder and harder to just chat with
everyone and then make it so), and quite likely the ArbCom (who, after
all, ultimately make decisions about what "counts" as policy through
their enforcement of it) should be the ones certifying.
But we don't have to solve all the big picture constitutional questions
when we can simply move forward usefully in the meantime.
--Jimbo