[WikiEN-l] ArbCom Legislation

[Wily D]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 11:27 PM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Wily D wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 12:57 PM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>>
>>> David Goodman wrote:
>>>
>>>> This is a proposal that will encourage administrators to not act
>>>> responsibly, by destroying the principle that an administrative action
>>>> can be overturned by another administrator.
>>>>
>>> That's in fact one of the core assumptions of administratorship, and the
>>> reason we keep emphasizing that it's "no big deal". Being an
>>> administrator *must not* give anyone unilateral special powers---only
>>> give them janitorial tasks, that anyone else can undo if there wasn't
>>> community consensus for the original change. Such a huge policy change
>>> change is a significant overstep of the Arbitration Committee's
>>> authority, and therefore cannot be regarded as binding.
>>>
>>> -Mark
>>>
>>>
>>
>> It can be regarded as binding in the sense that at the moment if you
>> don't comply with it, you'll be desysoped or banned (or, not xor).
>>
> It depends on the situation. The Arbitration Committee is only empowered
> to resolve specific disputes; their dispute-resolution does not
> literally create precedent in some legalistic sense, although it can be
> used as an indication of how similar disputes might be resolved in the
> future, barring a change in sentiment or committee membership, and may
> also influence how community consensus operates. To go from a ruling in
> a specific case to actual general policy applying to all people, though,
> requires the usual policy-creation consensus step. For example, the
> Arbitration Committee banned a few people for excessive edit-warring,
> but it did not invent the 3-revert-rule--- that was done through a
> separate community process which turned the Arbitration Committee's bans
> for excessive edit-warring in a few specific cases into a general policy
> outlining what precisely is prohibited.

Maybe you have not read the ArbCom's ruling? It's probably worthwhile.
 You can find it at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Footnoted_quotes#Special_enforcement_on_biographies_of_living_persons
and it's very explicitly a general policy that applies to all editors
everywhere.  It explicitly creates a new noticeboard for those
claiming the new priviledge ArbCom has granted administraters.

> In this case, I think it's fair to say that the Arbitration Committee's
> ruling has not been accepted by consensus of the community as a general
> policy to be applied in other cases, and so anyone banning a person not
> directly involve in the case based on the "precedent" would be
> overstepping their authority as an administrator.
>
> -Mark
>
Err, banning based on this ruling in the future is explicilty allowed
by the ruling.  Since ArbCom has said this, and they're the only
source of desysopings for behaviour, it's at least the case that you'd
remain an admin if you acted.

WilyD