The flaw isn't the oversight body, it's the almost complete lack of policies about 'crime and punishment'. It's not leadership; having a leader is very good, but only if they do the right things. No, what is lacking is a workable theory about what the right thing to do about conflict is in the context of the wiki.
The way it works at the moment is anarchy at the administrator level and above. Other than a few rules about not administrating when directly involved, admins are allowed by the policies to do just about anything; and there's essentially nothing to stop admins ganging up on users; and this happens not as infrequently as you would hope. That's where it goes all Stanford Prison Experiment.
The reason it's like this is because Sanger was a philosopher of knowledge, and he shaped the policies to collect knowledge really well, but he doesn't have the slightest clue about crime and punishment.
The areas that work the best are things like 3RR; because it's fairly clear-cut. But even then, the length of punishments for going 3RR occasionally range from nothing to permanent bans,* more or less entirely on administrator whim (modified only somewhat by the administrators fear of the crowd).
It's basically the problem is that editors have no 'civil rights'; there's no policy against severe punishments for trivial transgressions.
*- they don't usually ban people outright for 3RR, they just mark people as 'trouble makers' and then ban them for increasingly minor infractions later. It's sort of like a death penalty for parking offenses because you've parked in the wrong place before, and 'know what you were doing' and therefore 'deserved it'.
On 28 October 2011 18:52, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
I agree with you completely, Phil. ArbCom, as it presently is, is a disaster. And is a major obstacle to achieving a healthy, collaborative
and
fair creative community. My questions are: Who has the power to change
that?
How would the process that could evaluate ArbCom, and bring about
change,
get started? I would be interested in helping.
on 10/28/11 12:40 PM, Carcharoth at carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
ArbCom has far less influence than people give it credit for. What you are looking for is leadership, and that has to come from the community (or a body elected for that purpose by the community), not a dispute resolution body (which is what ArbCom is, or at least what it started out as). What is needed is a body other than ArbCom to provide leadership. That is what Wikipedia is lacking. There have been attempts (by both ArbCom and the community) to institute such a body, but the "community" tends to resist radical change, which is of course part of the problem (though it is also a safety feature against too radical changes).
The upcoming ArbCom elections might be a good time to air some of these matters, but only if done in a well-thought out manner, by someone with the time and motivation to see through a process that may take months or years to come to a conclusion.
Carcharoth
I agree with you completely, Carcharoth, that "What is needed is a body other than ArbCom to provide leadership". It is this lack of a formal, structured full-oversight body this is the fatal flaw in the entire Wikipedia Project. But to try and establish this body via ArbCom doesn't register with me. I believe such a new concept such as this will require a formal resolution, or whatever mechanism such additions or alterations to the structure of the Project require.
Marc
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