On 31/01/2011 19:07, Stephanie Daugherty wrote:
I think Risker hit the nail on the head. ArbCom is
organized purely as a
"court of last resort", but in the absence of other effective and
streamlined governance, or a vast political change within en.wp's community,
the only likely way any reform could happen is for it to be imposed by the
WMF.
Some assumptions there, surely. But it is probably true that if the
community fails long-term to deal with a specific issue, it becomes an
item on the WMF agenda.
Many of the same people who contribute to the problem
are well-invested in
keeping the status quo, because real reforms are threatening to them. Our
current implementation of consensus is too far from the ideals of consensus
- open participation where all views are heard and where decisions are made
through collaboration and compromise has given way to fillibustering,
contention, and in some cases personal attacks.
Certainly. The issue of the
"vested" editors has been aired in the past.
Basically the vested (some of them) have their posses, and therefore
consider themselves immune from RfCs. Mediation can be turned aside by
being awkward enough. And so we get back to the ArbCom saying they
cannot deal with the issues. Actually it is not precisely their fault,
but the community's. We actually prefer editing to drama, but the nettle
hasn't been grasped in the past, and so things are not in as good a
state as they might be (in an ideal world).
Anyway, at the top of the thread I had some suggestions that aren't of
the form "radical change required but won't happen".
I honestly don't know what the fix would entail,
but I do know that it
starts with fixing how en.wp, and probably any other large WMF projects are
governed to make sure that a handful of us can't undermine our ideals.
The WMF
is in a position to hire staff to "guide" the communities. Which
of course won't happen any time soon.
Charles