Delirium wrote:
Well, in practice that makes it a community organization of sorts. More to the point, it's only useful insofar as the community sees the arbitration committee as performing a useful function in a useful way. If it were ever the case that there were strong community consensus against some portion of how the AC works, then it would be problematic for it to continue working that way, fiat or no. Legally, of course, it can do whatever, since the community doesn't own the servers, but it would be undesirable to say the least.
Absolutely right. As our system has evolved, I think we are in a fairly reasonable position vis-a-vis the relationship between the community and the arbcom.
The arbcom is a judicial sort of body, not a legislative sort of body, and as such, having them worry too much about popularity is not a good thing. Judges sometimes have to make hard decisions and editing Wikipedia is not a popularity contest.
On the other hand, of course, it's extremely important that judging reflect community consensus about the detailed application of our customs and rules _in the service of our mission_.
I regard my role in the process as primarily being about a defense of the community in the service of our mission. This means that we won't be overrun as the community grows by people who don't share our core values. "The community" is defined ultimately by "people who share our values in terms of writing a high quality NPOV encyclopedia", not defined ultimately by "people who come on the website and make a lot of noise".
--Jimbo