[WikiEN-l] ArbCom Legislation

[geni]

2008/6/18 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>:
> The basic point of any serious, official, central point fits into much
> less than 1K.

And where can I find this 1K?

>  And, yes, we want those key aspects to be enforceable;

There is more than 1 way of making things enforceable.

> and in the case of BLP we want enforcement to keep Wikipedia out of
> aspects of the lives of people that are nothing like encyclopedic, and
> can cause potential defamation issues.

Interesting claim. See I've also run into claims that BLP is mostly
about people staying within the law.

>The bloat that goes on has never
> been an argument for not respecting and being tough about the central
> planks of policy.

If it's bloat you can isolate the core policy. Wikipedia:Non-free
content is fairly long but the core policy is less than 2 screens.

> I'll repeat here my basic credo on admin powers: admins should be given
> discretion to do the job.

And indeed they are.

> The very small proportion who abuse that
> discretion can expect to lose the powers.  I think this is a very
> positive view of admins, and (in fact) if they as individuals don't live
> up to it, they can be replaced (per "no big deal", quaint though that
> now sounds).
>
> The whole draft of the remedy at issue could probably be replaced by a
> one-liner, to do with the discretionary powers used for BLP enforcement,
> and the respect accorded to those admins in the front line.  Trouble is,
> there are so many wannabe constitutional lawyers out there now on the
> wiki, we'd never get away with the supposed vagueness.


No your problem is that there are a large number of people from
different backgrounds with very different world views who will read
ultra vague text in very different ways.

Sure you can technically get a one line version along the lines of
"Articles should not contain content which would not be reasonably
possible to successfully defend under US civil law" but I'd probably
need a second line to clarify which states.

However at least that would be clear enough to build an enforcement
system on so perhaps thats what you should go for.

You see policy is our first line of defense when it comes to getting
admins to do what we want since it lets them know what we want. The
odds of two admins looking out our BLP page and coming to the same
conclusion about that are minimal. The odds of them looking at WP:EDP
and coming to the same conclusion are rather higher which is why it is
brutally enforceable.


-- 
geni