Andrew Whitworth wrote:
I know Wikibooks is not Wikipedia, but the policies simply havn't been established at all for Wikibooks on this topic.
If this case wasn't happening, what do you think are the odds that the wikibooks community would accept an Arbcom, or create a policy on the matter? If you look through the list of rejected policies (you can find them on [[WB:PAG]]) you will see that the community has already rejected a proposed creation of a mediation committee (which is far less imposing then an arbitration committee). Using arbitration in this case is essentially an attempt to shotgun the creation of such a mechanism into practice, when the community at large generally doesnt need or want it.
Part of the reason for the rejection was that so many policies have been discussed, that many people (myself included) felt that we didn't need to create more policies just for the sake of having policies. The arbitration policy that was originally proposed was quite complicated. I'm still not sure if Wikibooks has enough users to justify a full standing ArbCom at the moment, although there do appear to be enough administrators who are active that such an ad-hoc group could be put together if the situation is warrented. The final wording of the policy at [[Wikibooks:Ad hoc administration committee]] is more common sense anyway, and not necessarily something that needs to be stated as a formal policy in order to be effective.
BTW, this is a far cry from the position we had on Wikibooks about a year and a half ago, when there was effectively only a single active administrator for the whole project. That we are talking about administrators with significant differences of opinions here and multiple admins, with users who aren't even administrators but are none the less very active Wikibookians is a very pleasant situation to be in all around. [[Special:Log/rights]] shows a huge growth of Wikibooks from the prespective that we are finally able to get some decent infrastructure into the Wikibooks project that has been been missing from when it first started.
Wikibooks is also growing to the point that I don't necessarily know each of the active users that are now participating. The days of reading the recent changes log just to see if anybody cared to contribute to Wikibooks are now over. That is now a firehose of information.