John Lee wrote:
What's the question? If the question is, "What authority does Jimbo have?" the answer is spelled out quite clearly: "He has no authority beyond that which he has been granted implicitly through the trust of the community."
And I ask for no more. We have a set of longstanding traditions about how things are done, and I think that for the most part, these traditions are workable and useful.
I think that I serve a useful role in, for example, this situation with WP:ATT. A major policy restructuring took place in a way that a huge number of very active and high quality editors were not consulted. I view my role in Wikipedia as being primarily about the defense of the broad community and "rule of law" rather than being about any particular policy or faction. (Outside of certain things that I think are foundational and beyond question and non-negotiable like NPOV.)
People tend to get very agitated from time to time. And then we tend to calm down and talk things over and people see that I am hardly the raging lunatic that at least some people seem to think. I like to move slowly and thoughtfully, and I like for the community to move slowly and thoughtfully.
If the community ever seeks to depose me from my special role, I hope that this will happen via a thoughtful process, but I actually think it is completely unnecessary. It is my intention to fade into a purely symbolic position over time.
In a case like the present one, there is actually no really good answer about how policy shifts become official. In the case of 3RR, we had an excellent approach... a broad disucssion, a community vote, and then my personal certification that policy had changed. This led to a clear and definable policy shift, without a wheel war or factions fighting endlessly.
Such orderly processes are beneficial, but we have not designed them in all cases.
In the current case, it looks like the right way forward is exactly the 3RR way. A broad community discussion to shed light on the very good work done by a group of people laboring away on WP:ATT and related pages, and then a poll to assess the feelings of the community as best we can, and then we can have a final certification of the results.
In the future, such a process should be made more formalized I think (as we get bigger and bigger, it is harder and harder to just chat with everyone and then make it so), and quite likely the ArbCom (who, after all, ultimately make decisions about what "counts" as policy through their enforcement of it) should be the ones certifying.
But we don't have to solve all the big picture constitutional questions when we can simply move forward usefully in the meantime.
--Jimbo