David Goodman wrote:
"we want ... to keep Wikipedia out of aspects of the lives of people that are nothing like encyclopedic, and can cause potential defamation issues. "
That only sounds good until one analyses it.
I think most of us just want to keep Wikipedia away from unsourced negative material about living people, and possibly some of us also want to keep away from even sourced material not relevant to notability, & derogatory in a serious way to people the intimate details of whose lives are not a matter of public concern.
That's a much narrower restriction than what you said, and much more compatible with NPOV, and with the actual wording of BLP.
The mission is to write an encyclopedia, right, not a scandal sheet? The disagreements I see aren't really about the term "encyclopedic".
NPOV is not negotiable. Any reliably-sourced facts that truly are required to write a neutral piece should be included. But the whole point of the BLP policy is to have a minimum standard of inclusion for topics (excluding the prurient, and the sort of tittle-tattle that you find in low-class blogging), as well as minimum standards for sourcing. You can go a long way about writing a neutral article about someone without mentioning they once kicked a dog in the street.
In real life examples of enforcement this becomes fairly clear.
And anything and everything dealing with living people is potentially defamatory if for reasons right or wrong they don't like what is being said. I think most of us would think it more compatible with NPOV to keep out only what can plausibly be considered as actually libelous, again a much narrower restriction.
Err ... this is an international project, and "libel" means different things in different legal systems. Therefore it isn't especially helpful, especially if you're default to US law as the baseline. As Jimmy Wales as often mentioned, we should not be posting defamatory matter, just as a question of ethics. Let alone the possibility that the whole project might be closed down by a successful libel suit.
This illustrates what arbcom did wrong: they legislated that anyone with a more broadly restrictive view can impose it. Possibly some of them may have actually known what they were doing, and specifically tried to impose their minority view.
We did no such thing. An admin isn't "anybody". but a trusted person with (we assume) a good working knowledge of the site policy and mission. No one can impose on Wikipedia, and admins, in particular, are fully accountable for their actions.
Let me explain it this way. If the ArbCom had voted through a principle like this:
"Admins enforcing WP:BLP should encounter the minimum of formalities and dickering, and should have their judgement treated with the maximum of respect by other admins",
then I think there would be only a vague murmur of discussion. The same ideas were put in a remedy, dressed up in some drafting to put flesh on the bones, and with a practical suggestion. Namely, admins should be stating more explicitly what they are doing as enforcement, logging it as sanctions on a noticeboard, and discussion there should be treated under the protocol that the sanction stands until there is a clear consensus against.
Just as ArbCom principles are, this is only "advisory". What people seem to miss, in close reading of existing policy documents, is that "policy" has never been entirely written on the site. Community norms and notions of good practice have always mattered greatly. Arbitrators play their part in contributing to that wider discourse, as they are expected to. The judicial analogy, that this is "judge-made law", is wrong. It mistakes the legalistic trappings for what is really happening. Arbitration cases are the only case studies on the site that come with anything like adequate documentation, and therefore they provide an unmatched, serious commentary on the site's management.
Charles