On 1/4/07, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
I have lothed the day that this would be necessary, but Wikibooks has now gone to a formal user arbitration situation.
For details, see:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Arbitration/Panic2k4_vs._SBJohnny
I have agreeed to step in here in terms of trying to resolve this situation. Panic hasn't been doing blatant vandalism, but he has been making it tough (apparently) to edit the C++ Programming Wikibook and has made a few enemies and a few others who are upset over his editorial style.
In an attempt to formalize this discussion and try to bring some order here, and to keep this from spilling into areas like policy pages to legislate the behavior of Panic out of existance, this has really turned into a judicial situation instead. Both that, and this situation is quickly approaching the level of blatant wheel warring, and I want to nip that right away to keep it from happening.
Yes, this is perhaps a little more complicated than the Wikipedia arbitration. OK, that is intentional in this situation, as I would like to set this up in such a way that you don't want to go through this meat grinder if at all possible. Arbitration is clearly the last and final resort beyond trying to pull in people from outside of the project to make very arbitrary decisions based on very incomplete information. I certainly don't want to see Jimbo, Anthere, or Erik having to get involved here being pressured to act when they won't know what is going on in the first place. I know I have had to ask around a bit and work hard to even see if there is a case to be made here at all.
It is my hope that these arbitration/mediation cases are very, very rare. I'm trying hard to stay objective here as well, and am leaving most of what is said to the discussion pages above.
Once all of this has been more or less resolved, I hope that we can come up with the formal arbitration guidelines that have been discussed now for more than a year on Wikibooks. I guess that until a situation like this came up, there wasn't a percieved need to get this put together.
*Sigh* it was only a matter of time. Get a bunch of people working together, and people will suddenly not want to work together for whatever reason :-/
I have not looked at the current issue (in fact, this is the first time I have heard of it. But I feel that in this specific case, community consensus may be a bad thing. Eventually, there may be groups of users vs other groups of users. Maybe Jimbo or some other person would have to step in there.
Oy, this is a whole new can-o-worms in Wikibooks policy...
--Dragontamer