[WikiEN-l] ArbCom Legislation

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 18 Jun 2008 at 00:30:34 -0700, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> 
wrote:

> It's a common assumption that administrators will act responsibly, but 
> that has not consistently been borne out by the facts. To say that we 
> will have the opportunity to look at it again is either na?ve or a POV 
> push.  Nobody is trying to overthrow a ruling as it related to the 
> parties involved in that particular case.  Most of us do not follow 
> Arbcom cases, and to not participate in their petty details, so it would 
> be grossly improper to have such a ruling extrapolated onto everyone else.

And in this case, the remedy was attached to a case that didn't seem, 
on its face, to have anything whatsoever to do with the issue the 
remedy was addressing; it was a case about the formatting of 
reference quotes, about as "wiki-wonky" a topic as you can imagine, 
and got very little attention even from those who regularly follow 
what the ArbCom is up to, compared to some more drama-intensive 
ArbCom cases going on at the same time.

ArbCom says as a matter of ideology that it doesn't make policy and 
is not obliged to follow precedent, but in this case they seem to 
have made policy, and done so in a highly stealthy manner seemingly 
designed to be placed in force with as little community comment or 
notice as possible.  They perhaps hoped that it would remain beneath 
the radar in the usual drama venues until it began to be quietly 
enforced.

A more above-board manner of adopting such a remedy, if the ArbCom 
were insistent on doing it, would be to have had a case specifically 
on the subject of BLP enforcement and its failures, with parties who 
were involved in BLP controversies and had a live dispute in that 
area (the function of ArbCom, after all, is to resolve disputes, not 
start them).  Then, the community would know that a sanction in that 
area was being proposed and could present relevant evidence for or 
against it.  Instead, the actual case has (as far as I could see) not 
a single piece of evidence on its evidence page that relates to the 
subject of this remedy.


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