Berto 'd Sera wrote:
Pls stop unblocking yourself asap and only ask for external intervention (as you are already doing, I seem to understand). I know that asking something is easy, but getting WMF to make ANY decision (even the most elementary ones) is actually harder than changing Earth's Orbit with your bare hands, so one can easily be tempted by a "Do It Yourself" solution. After all it's what wikies are about, isn't it? Yet when it gets to conflict it's the wrong way, believe me.
I don't think we should expect the WMF to solve this kind of problem. This may be the kind of situation where a steward should step in to help them find a solution.
I'd really welcome an external "sort of U.N." ArbCom for things like these. I know it's not nice when we have to deal with annoying petty quarrels but someone must do the job, because no job gets done by leaving it on the table until the paper on which its specs are written gets destroyed by time.
In the current dispute both parties are fluent English speakers so it could probably work. In some cases like wikis in other First Nations languages there may be nobody else available who is capable of understanding the language. At least attempting mediation would only need one person to look into the problem, and the disputants would need to provide a summary of the situation.
The result is but one anyway: only those who comply with "the rules" stay in and the community grows as a sect. Once it's not going to be just 2 guys but a full 300 people monolithically structured around some implicit "belief" of theirs... then you bet you're going to have a hard time in making that wiki behave like a wiki should.
Except for broad Wiki-wide principles rules in a 2-person wiki can be fairly meaningless. Either can propose a rule, and have the other half of the membership opposed to that rule.
Ec