Sam Korn wrote: "Be bold"

John Lee wrote: Arbcom is perhaps the hardest kind of position to elect, because the people involved have to get in the middle of all the worst fights in WP. To take the project I've been involved with the longest, WikiProject Ships, there have only been a couple serious arguments in the nearly three years of its existence. Most of the time it works to have one person propose, one or two say "good idea", and the rest silently acquiesce in the new order of things. Other times you get a proposal, an objection, a bit of discussion, and then deadlock; nobody wants to call a vote even, because it would simply numerify the near even split. The irony is that everybody is acting in good faith, and if a "first among equals" were to break the tie, project members would just go along. For many projects, I imagine that if someone were to put a hand up, that person would be elected by acclaim; others may indeed need to set up more of a formal balloting process. I'm not sure how much WP as a whole needs to get involved. It might be sufficient just to announce that projects are free to have "leads", let them each experiment, and then later recommend to all projects what seems to work the best. To tie back to AfD, if it were a project's prerogative to define deletion criteria, then AfD could become more of a routing mechanism that delegates articles' fates to projects. I'm not going to scan AfD every day on the off-chance that a nautical topic comes up, but would take time for a lower-volume "AfD/Ships", for instance. Stan

On 1/12/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ergo my earlier suggestion that, if we give more autonomy to WikiProjects, we should have some sort of community accreditation for it. In other words, it would be up to the community at large to delegate control to each specific project as necessary. WikiProject Schools may be too contentious, and may therefore be refused such authority; but for many projects this would not be an issue. Kirill Lokshin

On 1/12/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: If you mean in the case of disagreement within a project, their votes could be discounted under the same reasoning that we discount votes from very new users in AFD: they're not really part of the community (referring, in this case, to the project rather than to Wikipedia as a whole). Given that most projects don't fall apart over day-to-day disagreements, there's no reason to think that adding any formal weight to the process would suddenly result in a rash of vote-stacking. There are, of course, a few projects that exist mainly as glorified debating forums rather than resources for collaborative editing; presumably they would not be given the authority to run their own deletion discussions. Kirill Lokshin

Stan Shebs wrote: (In case WP:DS is something else, it should be [[Wikipedia:Deletion sorting]]...) -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

On 5/11/06, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gawab.com> wrote: A lot of the problems however were caused people people trying to do exactly that, -- geni

"Guy Chapman aka JzG" wrote I've not actually read a fundamental analysis that I have found convincing; and some of the things being written here strike me as back to front. Can one actually draw a line betweeen bumper-sticker-sans-vehicle loudmouth talk (e.g. annoying userbox I saw about intolerance of Commonwealth English), and identity politics, which at worst is highly divisive and at best puts partisan editing further up the agenda than it needs to be? It's tricky to do so.. And yet there is an inverse proportion going on, where it is arguable (in the real world) that it is more important to have the right of self-declaration and mutual recognition. The fundamental problem we know about is that there is a real world, off-wiki, and it keeps on intruding. Because WP is now media as well as 'pedia, its content affects the real world, implying a responsibility. It is a bit odd that the 'defining issue', since the January elections, is not to do with article content. I suppose if it were, we'd be worse off, since no one wants to see central control of article content. Charles

John Lee wrote: I agree that having someone on hand who can make these decisions is important. Obviously Jimbo can't do it all himself, because he can't be everywhere at once or spend the time needed to fully understand the specific disputes. It's not at all a question of the positions that he supports or what articles he would choose to delete. When he only occasionally steps in it makes matters worse because those appearances are unpredictable, and it leaves offenders with the hope that he will somehow step in and take their side. The authority of such a person would be separately determined for each sister project. The issue really breaks down to what kind of person would be suitable to the task. 1. The person must have the Jimbo's trust to the extent that Jimbo will not override his decisions without first discussing the issue fairly but not necessarily publicly with him. 2. The person must have the broad trust of the community even when he takes unpopular decisions. 3. The person must be seen as more a conciliator than one who insists that there is only one solution for every problem. 4. The person must be capable of finding a balance between public consensus and established policy. There are times when rigid adherence to policy is completely wrong, and other times when public consensus fails to consider the broader implications of that consensus. 5. The person must accept that he will sometimes make decisions that will incur hostile responses. 6. The person needs to be appointed rather than elected. The risk in an election is that it leaves a minority that may not feel represented by the person. 7. Etc. Ec