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.
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.
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.
-Stephanie
On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
In what way, David? I'm sorry, but the Arbitration Committee isn't Wikipedia Governance Central. I share the same frustration as the WMF staff and techies, and indeed many new and even experienced users, but you know as well as I do what the response of the community is when Arbcom tries to "make policy", let alone starts swooping down from on high on matters that the community has not brought to it. Meanwhile, over at RFA, this is the first time in donkey's years that we have four candidates all doing well, at least two of whom would have been getting a rough haul only a month ago; we seem to be going through a "nice" period there because more and more people are realising that we aren't getting the kind of admins we need for the project to succeed. There are still dozens of highly qualified editors who would make excellent admins, but refuse to participate in the nastiness that RFA has been for most of the last two years. I can only hope that this week's new trend continues for long enough to break the pattern of behaviour that had become endemic, so that other good candidates will be more willing to take the leap.
I have no idea what the board members are saying on the internal-L mailing list; however, if they're expressing concerns about behaviour there, they might want to actually mention it onwiki on the projects where there are concerns. Themselves. Wearing their Board hat, rather than their "I'm just an editor" hat. They're actually selected to be leaders of the WMF, and it would make it a darn sight easier to change community practices if the Trustees would be much more public in their pronouncements and sharing their experiences and observations. Internal-L is the last place where that will be helpful, with its extremely restrictive distribution and chapter-heavy membership.
Risker/Anne _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l