At 11:47 AM 6/17/2008, 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. Any one of the 1100 or so active administrators can delete material, tc. etc. and no one can overturn it without a definite community consensus. any one of the 1100 can be as arbitrary as he pleases, and get away with it unless the community is willing to actually actively oppose him. Thus, the bias will be towards removing material--which perhaps is what some people want with BLPs. Tell me, what would the reaction be if a proposal were mooted that any one of the 1100 administrators could mark BLP material as being kept, and could not be opposed without similar agreement?
It looks to me like ArbComm has gone totally mad. But I didn't read the arbitration. It's one thing to protect an article at the drop of a hat, and BLP policy would allow an admin to protect, in this case, to "a preferred version," but the proposal goes way beyond that.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a "definite community consensus" arise on Wikipedia. We don't have procedures for determining that; rather we have an escalating response process that is not designed for crisp decisions.