On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 2:24 PM, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Controlling content = "this article should or should not say X"
Controlling behaviour = "this editor should or should not do X"
In that sense, this proposal is about behaviour, because it is about good-faith editing (behaviour) and not the result of it (content).
However, the whole content v. behaviour thing is something of a false distinction. ArbCom prides itself on not controlling content, but it does it all the time indirectly by controlling who can edit, ruling on what counts as a reliable source, etc.
This is a proposal to enforce behaviour that upholds our own core content policy, and there's no problem with that tension. In fact, it's quite strange that none of our core content policies are currently enforced, except for BLPs.
"Enforcement" is not the problem. We have plenty of eager admins who are more than happy to "enforce policy." The issue (aside from indoctrinating new people into NPOV culture, accomplished via any means ranging from lifetime bans to inane amounts of barnstars), is getting a decent conceptual overview of how groups of articles need to be improved and then finding consensus to act on that impetus.
Such endeavors might be called something like "Wikipedia:WikiProject [Scope]," though the usage of the above terminology is attributable to a unfortunate convergence of factors (bottom)**.
The idea you have, Sarah, deals largely with bringing a certain concept of 'officiousness' to settling content disputes. You say its not about content, but fail to say why we would need a kind of special-purpose Arbcom. I and others have sufficiently destroyed your "enforcement" concept (perhaps taking a little too much gusto in doing so), but nevertheless some of us appear to want to salvage something from it, and thus can to some degree appreciate your general idea of shaking things up a bit, making changes, taking stands, focusing on areas which need better handling, and getting more hands-on rather than simply staying conceptual and borking ourselves with policy.
So I suggest not dealing with the Wikipublic at all: People such as myself wield no power, and can at best occasionally state only chuckleworthy things.
Make a proposal directly to Arbcom. Ask them to consider ways in which they can implement improvements to how they do things, and how they can sort of get people in on the game plan. Naturally we all know Arbcom (a metonym for the Wikipedian government, whether it officially exists or not), has lots of room for improvement. But they might not know that, and as such we would be quite wise not be too blunt about giving them the news.
Still, as critical as I am of Arbcom at this point (not impressed with their [mis-]re-conceptualization of the I case I filed recently), Arbcom the institution, I mean, I understand that the committee is made up of individuals, that not one of them is useless, and that they each and all can and will act to make some changes, when they start to understand that they actually can. We already know that they could (make improvements), and (dare we say it) should shake the cobwebs loose and get creative about how to make themselves and Wikipedia better.
But I realize, as do others, that it's important also not to suggest too much. Because aside from the fact that they might not like people telling them 1) that there's room for improvement, 2) that they should institute improvements, 3) telling them why they should improve, 4) and how, most conceptual people in general (and that's all of us) just don't like accepting anyone's existence, let alone their intelligence and creativity; and by extension the products of these qualities as we manifest them in what we might consider "helpful" proposals.
In that context, we can simply say "its up to them; help them O Ceiling Cat," and go back to our editing.
Regards,
-SV-1
**1) An unfortunate technical/technocratic inability to use the word "Project" as a namespace (which would produce something elegant like "Project:[Scope]")
2) A likewise unfortunate tendency to honor CamelCase as a kind of Wikipudlian meme, and
3) An equally unfortunate propensity we all have for using the word "wiki" in any context imaginable.
-SV