sannse wrote:
Is the arbitration committee going to make up their numbers by finding a replacement for Uninvited Company?
If so, can I suggest (in an annoyingly PC way) that the new member is a woman. As far as I know there are no women on the arbitration committee and I see no harm in balancing this a little.
Perhaps it shows my political leanings, but I don't really like that approach. Certainly we should have all opinions represented, and if certain opinions are only represented by women, then we should have women represented. But we should represent all opinions, not based on simple categorizations like gender, race, etc.---you can't assume that someone has certain personality or characteristics because they're female, or male, or hispanic, or whatnot (certainly most people I know offline don't follow the stereotypes, and many fit 'opposite' roles better). As far as wikipedia goes, things like inclusionist vs. deletionist, pro- vs. anti-banning, etc., are all more relevant distinctions by at least an order of magnitude.
So if there's a woman on the arbitration committee (or multiple women), it should be because of who they are, not just because we wanted to throw a token woman on there. Which, fortunately, is how Wikipedia normally works---I often can't tell if someone is male or female until it gets mentioned long after I've interacted with them for a while, and there's some surprises (for whatever reason, I thought that evercat was female, and that anthere was male).
And, FWIW, we allowed *everyone* on a committee who wanted to be on one. So at the moment the reason there are no women is because no women volunteered. If someone wants to volunteer, male or female, we could use an extra member to keep the numbers at the right level, so talk to Mr. Wales asap. =]
-Mark