[Foundation-l] The foundations of the Wikimedia Foundation (was: Wikimedia Council)

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On 1/4/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 04/01/2008, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Whatever its responsibilities, the meta-ArbCom should have its
> > membership selected from among active ArbCom members of other
> > projects, perhaps as a meta-representative selected by the local
> > ArbCom itself. I can foresee arguments based on workload and/or
> > removing an active elected ArbCom member from a local project, but I
> > think the benefits far outweight the negatives here (a multilingual
> > election that is local to no project and attracts only voters who are
> > active on meta).
>
> The big problem with that is that projects without their own arbcom
> (small projects, I guess) would not be represented. Selecting
> admins/crats from smaller projects would be a possible solution.
>
> The committee cannot feasibly be completely multilingual - discussions
> have to take place in one language to be at all practical (we can't
> have everything translated into every language - it works for the UN,
> it won't work for us). That language will, presumably, be English (it
> doesn't have to be, but that's likely to work best), so there will
> need to be a requirement that members of the committee speak
> reasonable English. It's an unfortunate restriction, but I can't see
> any way around it.

I can easily see a way around it.

The same method as has been sometimes suggested as a regulated
workflow on the monolingual arbcoms, and is defacto happening at
least on the english wikipedia arbcom, in a fairly granularized manner.

Not have every arbcom member available for each case.

It might work on the basis of having a dedicated French language
section of the arbcom, a Dutch language section of the arbcom,
a Portuguese language section of the arbcom and so forth, with
co-mingling between arbitrators from different language teams
being an exception rather than a rule.

Or it might be that every arbcom case would work on a pick and
mix principle, with arbitrators specifically announcing they are
available for a case, either being able to understand the working
language, or bringing in an assistant to help them understand
the issues as they pertain to things said in the working language.

The fact that this would entail bringing in a fairly large pool of
arbitrators, to me is a plus than a negative, as it would naturally
decrease the workload on any one arbitrator.


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