Excellent comments by Bod Notbod.
Posting my response under the 'A modest proposal - a recap of resolution-l' thread.
-Stevertigo
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 1:31 AM, Bod Notbodbodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
I like transparency too.
It makes me pause to wonder whether a dispute resolution mailing list is actually against the grain of that. I've only recently signed up to a couple of the mailing lists as I intend to get (and am getting) more involved with Wikipedia. These lists have a pretty low profile, I'd say.
Whilst these mailing lists are, I believe, open for everyone to join, it still strikes me as a bit of a back door: I would have thought it far more transparent to deal with all dispute resolution on the wiki itself where people can see what's going on (and people can place relevant links easily) rather than in an email list which is going to have a rather different audience.
To put it another way, if I were an editor in dispute with someone else and I wasn't subscribed to the mailing list and I become aware the other person was discussing it there, I think I'd rightly feel that there was something "going on" in a sort of conspiratorial way and that a conscious effort had been made to circumvent tackling my points.
The wiki (en, at least) doesn't seem short of ways and means to deal with disputes. I'm somewhat sceptical about the motivation in creating a new channel for disputes that requires all parties to sign up for an email service to be fully cognisant of where that dispute is heading.
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