[Foundation-l] VC - alternative resolution

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On 4/5/08, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Hm. Actually, your first point (arbitrating in extraordinary
> circumstances) is related to the Meta ArbCom, which in the future
> shouldn't be a part of VC. An, of course, I don't think that we should
> have a body which would take care about about every article. However,
> one of the jobs of VC should be taking care about systematic
> tendencies inside of the communities.

Do you mean like systematic bias as it is manifest on the
English language wikipedia?



> According to my intuitive understanding of your options, the answer
> is, of course, that I don't think that we need the final instance in
> the sense of hard and fast authority. The last thing I want is
> interfering in issues of well developed communities because some
> outsider (in the sense of that community; which includes future VC
> members) didn't want to wait a couple of hours or days to leave that
> community to solve the problem. At the other side, out-of-project
> disputes should be addressed somehow, including solving of heavy bias
> (or not so heavy, but systematic bias)  at some project noticed by an
> outsider.

Hmmm.

I do expect you mean in most cases telling the outsider to get lost,
stop trolling and the usual...

...but if there was something real at the bottom of it, then waiting
patiently for their own community to deal with it, perhaps waiting
even longer than would be strictly speaking necessary to be sure
the community itself cannot deal with it (just to avoid the appearance
of being a bunch of jackboots ready to parachute into any dispute)...

> I am still without a better word for the exact meaning for "the final
> instance", so I'll try to describe: We need a body which would address
> "no one's business". So, if a couple of instances (local admins,
> stewards, some committee...) refuse to take some issue as their
> business, there should be some "final instance" which will take care
> about such issues.

I think you may mean instead of final instance, a *last resort*, which
will take the burden.

Do you feel that expresses what you meant accurately?

> From time to time we have discussions at Meta about different issues.
> For example, we had a long discussion about bot generated articles at
> Volapuk Wikipedia. After a lot of talk, we came to the political
> solution (much more people was at one side). However, it didn't solve
> the problem. We still need answers for the questions raised there: (1)
> Are bot edits valid as human edits are? (2) Are there some limits of
> bots' usage? (3) Do we need conlang projects? -- I know *my* answers
> to all of those questions, but there is no community consensus about
> them as well as there is no any decision about those issues from some
> Wikimedian body.
>
> And "Proposal for radical cleanup of Volapuk Wikipedia" without a
> solution produced two more similar requests: proposal for "radical
> cleanup" of Polish Wikipedia, as well as proposal for limiting bots'
> activities (worded something like "to stop abusing bots").
>
> Again, today we don't have a body which would give answer to those
> questions or which would rise a Wikimedia-wide referendum about those
> questions.
>
> I hope that I gave to you now a clear description about what do I mean
> under the term "final authority".

Not sure. Would you say my phrasing "last resort", would be accurate?


Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]