[WikiEN-l] How to bring back people who don't want to bother?

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Stan Shebs wrote:
> John Lee wrote:
> 
>> Stan Shebs wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> It would be nice to have more internal leadership. I think part of
>>> the trick is to model after professional societies and trade unions,
>>> where most leadership positions are part-time on a volunteer basis.
>>> For instance, projects could elect lead editors, whose special role
>>> during their terms is to preside over discussion on issues, and then
>>> make an executive decision, thus eliminating the indecision arising
>>> from those 56%-44% votes (think of city naming conventions). A lead
>>> for user page policy could have saved a lot of userbox anguish by
>>> being on top of the practice from the beginning.
>>>
>>> Stan
>>>
>> The problem is that these positions are often elected - and as we have
>> learnt from the debacle of this and last last year's arbcom elections,
>> campaigning for these positions is *brutal*. There'll be even more
>> anguish if the 56%-44% vote decides more than just one issue. My
>> suggestion would be something similar to the current arbcom elections,
>> but less divisive. The community nominates certain people (how this is
>> done is up to them), who will then write their candidate statements,
>> etc. Those who oppose/support must provide links/diffs/etc. showing
>> why they oppose/support. For instance, "Oppose. [a few links to
>> instances of POV pushing]" Unless the situation may be ambiguous,
>> there should be no need to say "POV pusher" or "bad attitude". Then,
>> the board will review the candidates' statements (and those of the
>> people opposing/supporting them), and make its decision. (If this was
>> a bit hard to follow, please let me know.) It sounds a bit
>> bureaucratic, but I think it has a bit of potential if we're going to
>> have a "lead editor".
> 
> 
> Arbcom is perhaps the hardest kind of position to elect, because the
> people involved have to get in the middle of all the worst fights in
> WP. To take the project I've been involved with the longest,
> WikiProject Ships, there have only been a couple serious arguments in
> the nearly three years of its existence. Most of the time it works to
> have one person propose, one or two say "good idea", and the rest
> silently acquiesce in the new order of things. Other times you get a
> proposal, an objection, a bit of discussion, and then deadlock; nobody
> wants to call a vote even, because it would simply numerify the near
> even split. The irony is that everybody is acting in good faith, and
> if a "first among equals" were to break the tie, project members would
> just go along. For many projects, I imagine that if someone were to put
> a hand up, that person would be elected by acclaim; others may indeed
> need to set up more of a formal balloting process.
> 
> I'm not sure how much WP as a whole needs to get involved. It might be
> sufficient just to announce that projects are free to have "leads", let
> them each experiment, and then later recommend to all projects what
> seems to work the best.
> 
> To tie back to AfD, if it were a project's prerogative to define
> deletion criteria, then AfD could become more of a routing mechanism
> that delegates articles' fates to projects. I'm not going to scan
> AfD every day on the off-chance that a nautical topic comes up, but
> would take time for a lower-volume "AfD/Ships", for instance.
> 

>From memory [[WP:DS]] is sorting out AFD by topic/subject area...

(In case WP:DS is something else, it should be [[Wikipedia:Deletion
sorting]]...)

-- 
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
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