David Gerard wrote:
He also has, separately from his Board role, the final
smackdown on
en:wp, which he almost never uses (it's delegated to the Arbitration
Committee because Jimbo doesn't scale) and which causes great
arguments every time he does.
I'm sure there are a lot of people who see his comments on either side
of a dispute as so much drive-by. Given the amount of his travelling,
his participation in some of these chronic debates is necessarily limited.
I find myself amazed at how outsiders think Jimbo has
absolute power
at Wikipedia, when if he said the sky was blue lots of people would
disagree almost by reflex ... and then it's down to his powers of
persuasion, same as if any of us want to convince people of something.
I suppose he has a lot more ears listening to him.
There's a certain amount of
hero-worshiping going on, whether he agrees
with it or not. It's more like a game of Simon says. There are any
number of debaters who are not past trying to win an argument saying,
"But on September 30, 2004, Jimbo said ..." He may have changed his
mind since, or the quotation may be out of context. Such drop-dead
arguments from authority tend to circumvent whatever the real current issue.
Ec