[WikiEN-l] ArbCom Legislation

[Delirium]

Wily D wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 12:57 PM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>   
>> David Goodman wrote:
>>     
>>> This is a proposal that will encourage administrators to not act
>>> responsibly, by destroying the principle that an administrative action
>>> can be overturned by another administrator.
>>>       
>> That's in fact one of the core assumptions of administratorship, and the
>> reason we keep emphasizing that it's "no big deal". Being an
>> administrator *must not* give anyone unilateral special powers---only
>> give them janitorial tasks, that anyone else can undo if there wasn't
>> community consensus for the original change. Such a huge policy change
>> change is a significant overstep of the Arbitration Committee's
>> authority, and therefore cannot be regarded as binding.
>>
>> -Mark
>>
>>     
>
> It can be regarded as binding in the sense that at the moment if you
> don't comply with it, you'll be desysoped or banned (or, not xor).
>   
It depends on the situation. The Arbitration Committee is only empowered 
to resolve specific disputes; their dispute-resolution does not 
literally create precedent in some legalistic sense, although it can be 
used as an indication of how similar disputes might be resolved in the 
future, barring a change in sentiment or committee membership, and may 
also influence how community consensus operates. To go from a ruling in 
a specific case to actual general policy applying to all people, though, 
requires the usual policy-creation consensus step. For example, the 
Arbitration Committee banned a few people for excessive edit-warring, 
but it did not invent the 3-revert-rule--- that was done through a 
separate community process which turned the Arbitration Committee's bans 
for excessive edit-warring in a few specific cases into a general policy 
outlining what precisely is prohibited.

In this case, I think it's fair to say that the Arbitration Committee's 
ruling has not been accepted by consensus of the community as a general 
policy to be applied in other cases, and so anyone banning a person not 
directly involve in the case based on the "precedent" would be 
overstepping their authority as an administrator.

-Mark