On 18 Jun 2008 at 00:30:34 -0700, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
It's a common assumption that administrators will act responsibly, but that has not consistently been borne out by the facts. To say that we will have the opportunity to look at it again is either na?ve or a POV push. Nobody is trying to overthrow a ruling as it related to the parties involved in that particular case. Most of us do not follow Arbcom cases, and to not participate in their petty details, so it would be grossly improper to have such a ruling extrapolated onto everyone else.
And in this case, the remedy was attached to a case that didn't seem, on its face, to have anything whatsoever to do with the issue the remedy was addressing; it was a case about the formatting of reference quotes, about as "wiki-wonky" a topic as you can imagine, and got very little attention even from those who regularly follow what the ArbCom is up to, compared to some more drama-intensive ArbCom cases going on at the same time.
ArbCom says as a matter of ideology that it doesn't make policy and is not obliged to follow precedent, but in this case they seem to have made policy, and done so in a highly stealthy manner seemingly designed to be placed in force with as little community comment or notice as possible. They perhaps hoped that it would remain beneath the radar in the usual drama venues until it began to be quietly enforced.
A more above-board manner of adopting such a remedy, if the ArbCom were insistent on doing it, would be to have had a case specifically on the subject of BLP enforcement and its failures, with parties who were involved in BLP controversies and had a live dispute in that area (the function of ArbCom, after all, is to resolve disputes, not start them). Then, the community would know that a sanction in that area was being proposed and could present relevant evidence for or against it. Instead, the actual case has (as far as I could see) not a single piece of evidence on its evidence page that relates to the subject of this remedy.