[Foundation-l] breaking English Wikipedia apart

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Mon, 14/3/11, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] breaking English Wikipedia apart
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Monday, 14 March, 2011, 13:53
> On 14 March 2011 13:46, Andreas Kolbe
> <jayen466 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Having a single person would not work, as people would
> assume that a single
> > person may have their own personal biases affecting
> their judgment.
> > An elected committee might work, and I do think we
> should look at empowering
> > such a committee to remove the right to edit BLPs from
> editors who
> > repeatedly abuse it, and at creating the technical
> means to do so.
> 
> 
> An elected committee to deal with editor disputes ... we
> could call it
> the Arbitration Committee!

 
What I had in mind was a committee looking at BLP editing issues. That
does not mean that there must have been an editing dispute at the article
concerned. If someone added inappropriate information to a series of 
minor articles three months ago while no one was looking, and the matter 
is brought to the committee's attention, they could warn the editor or 
remove their BLP editing right, temporarily or permanently. They could even 
patrol BLPs themselves, if they run out of things to do, and contact editors 
who have a history of inserting problematic material off their own bat. 
That would actually be a BLP policing job and is different from the way 
arbcom works in en:WP.

Again, any action taken by the committee should be taken by the committee
as a whole, rather than any individual member of it, so no one can abuse
the position to even scores with old adversaries. Arbcom could be appealed 
to if any editor feels aggrieved by the actions of the BLP committee; to have
checks and balances, it would be useful to have these be two different bodies.

Andreas