[WikiEN-l] ArbCom Legislation

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 11:47 AM 6/17/2008, 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. Any one of the 1100 or so
>active administrators can delete material, tc. etc. and no one can
>overturn it without a definite  community consensus. any one of the
>1100 can be as  arbitrary as he pleases, and get away with it unless
>the community is willing to actually actively oppose him.  Thus, the
>bias will be towards removing material--which perhaps is what some
>people want with BLPs. Tell me, what would the reaction be if a
>proposal were mooted that any one of the 1100 administrators could
>mark BLP material as being kept, and could not be opposed without
>similar agreement?

It looks to me like ArbComm has gone totally mad. But I didn't read 
the arbitration. It's one thing to protect an article at the drop of 
a hat, and BLP policy would allow an admin to protect, in this case, 
to "a preferred version," but the proposal goes way beyond that.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a "definite community consensus" arise on 
Wikipedia. We don't have procedures for determining that; rather we 
have an escalating response process that is not designed for crisp decisions.