On 30 October 2011 11:30, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.comwrote:
I'm not a big fan of abstract calls for strong leadership, and I genuinely don't see Arbcom as being a disaster - though there could be things it has done that I'm not aware of. That doesn't mean I'm opposed to changes that would make the pedia a "healthy, collaborative and fair creative community", just not convinced that reforming or replacing Arbcom is the place to start.
Without knowing which aspects of the pedia Marc and Phil diagnose as unfair or unhealthy it is difficult to know if your diagnosis is the same or the reverse of mine. Though our preferred solutions are certainly dissimilar. I'm not convinced that "lack of a formal, structured full-oversight body this is the fatal flaw in the entire Wikipedia Project". Remember the wiki is at its strongest as a self organising community where people don't have to file requests in triplicate with some commissar. I like the flexibility of being able to launch things like the death anomaly project without having to seek approval from some central authority. To me "a formal, structured full-oversight body" isn't a way to achieve a "healthy, collaborative and fair creative community", if anything its the reverse.
That said we are a community in a longterm decline, which isn't in itself healthy; But we are a large and committed community that is still getting a lot done, so one shouldn't exaggerate the unhealthiness. We are still in large parts an astonishingly collaborative community, despite the unfortunate shift from fixing things to tagging them for others to fix. As for the fairness, I'd be interest in knowing which specific aspects you consider unfair. If there are any current or potential Arbs who you consider unfair then the time to say so is during the election for Arbcom. A well constructed case demonstrating that a candidate had a tendency to unfairness would probably tank any candidate for Arbcom.
That's a reasonable overall analysis, though I might want to pick up
specifics.
Bear in mind, though, the multiplicity of points of view with which people approach these themes. One can single out:
(a) Management consultant: Breezy views from outside the community that ignore the fundamental difficulty of implementing anything. (b) Doomwatch: Extrapolation to the point of radical failure (usually of enWP to the exclusion of all the other projects) based on some one-dimensional view and ignoring trends that favour the work (e.g. new stuff that is helpful coming online all the time). (c) Constitutional theorist: A better written constitution would be, well, better. Ignoring therefore the "WP works only in practice, not in theory" riff. (d) Golden Ager: Thinks things used to be better, against most experience of what things really used to be like. (e) Backlogs will kill us ecologically: A Doomwatch theory that ignores the way that editors reassign themselves. (f) Jimbo is dead: As with Paul McCartney, not true, just better known for other roles these days. This seems to be a Golden Ager theory based on the idea that it was all much better once, when Jimmy Wales had to do 14 hours a day reading emails to keep things on track (with a few phone calls and some IRC). (g) ArbCom doesn't do what it might: This gets a bit closer, ignoring the fact that the community view is skewed toward ArbCom not doing what it might, at least among enWP's "political activists". (h) More central control: Given community views on ArbCom, this is one of the least likely solutions to anything, I believe. This a recurring debating point, both on content and on behaviour. Any further elected body is likely to have just the same issues with interfacing with the community. Perhaps there is some mileage in the concept of a deliberative body that gets round doing everything by "direct democracy". (i) The whole system is bent: See a few vocal Wikipedia critics, passim. But that is clearly neither true, nor even arguable except on the basis of selective use of anecdotal evidence (of which of course there is an overwhelming supply by now).
That is probably nearly enough from me, but a potted version of my "solutions": (i) Discuss the history in a more informed and conceptual way; (ii) Divide out community roles where the WMF could step in, from those where they really can't; (iii) Get to the point where the "management consultant" approach on civility and newbie-biting is replaced by a more concerted community effort to tell rude folk on the site that they are problem editors, no matter what they write. In particular I have felt for quite some time that the Marc Riddell diagnosis really falls at all three of these hurdles.
Charles