On 25 July 2012 23:41, Deryck Chan deryckchan@gmail.com wrote:
It is in the spirit of the Wikimedia movement that different projects and communities within the movement make decisions independently, and decisions on one project need not affect another. Therefore, I'm with David and many others in the opinion that the en.wp arbcom ban need not imply that Fæ must step down as WMUK chair.
Trying to narrow it down to arbcom is a mistake. The reality is that for any particular arbcom decision to sit they need to maintain the active support of most of the highly active admins and the passive support of a decent majority of the admin/editor community. At the present time they do.
However, if Fæ does remain as WMUK chair, we will inevitably be making a stance of antagonism towards en.wp. The Chapters Association can afford to take such a stance because it's a multicultural association and few in its active community are heavily involved with en.wp; but with en.wp being the single largest Wikimedia project WMUK members also participate in, we might want to rethink.
It would rather clash with the object " to promote and support the widest possible public access to, use of and contribution to Open Content of an encyclopaedic or educational nature or of similar utility to the general public, in particular the Open Content supported and provided by Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., based in San Francisco, California, USA."
A board resolution or an EGM reconfirmation vote will let us make ourselves clear as to whether we want to say "screw you en.wp arbcom, we love Fæ", or "we want to be nice, be risk-averse, and avoid a PR crisis". However, we as WMUK must make our position clear on this. Not taking a stance would be the worst PR disaster we can create for ourselves at this point.
Well that's something of a misstatement of my argument.