[Foundation-l] breaking English Wikipedia apart

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

> An elected committee to deal with editor disputes ... we could call it
> the Arbitration Committee!
> 
> Except the arbcom feels it has lost so much community confidence it
> doesn't even feel it has the power to enforce long-standing
> fundamental policies:
> 
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2011-January/108319.html
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2011-January/108321.html
> 
> (The context there being that they feel they can't maintain the rule
> "no personal attacks" even to the admins.)
> 
> Are you suggesting something like a second, parallel arbcom if the
> first has finally stalled?
> 
> 

This was also a part of the discussion of the Quality Taskforce/Strategy
mentioned earlier by FT2 in this thread. One of the ideas of getting the
"trusted editor" status, whatever it means and whatever are the criteria to
get it (if I remember correctly, we never came down to such details) was
that these trusted editors can resolve disputed related to content (POV
etc), whereas the arbcom role is to resolve conflicts between users. These
are two different issues and require two different (possibly overlapping)
sorts of arbitrators: to fix the POV or BLP issue one has to be experienced
in writing Wikipedia articles, whereas to solve for instance a personal
conflict one has to be a good mediator but not necessarily a good article
writer.

Cheers
Yaroslav