[WikiEN-l] Civility poll results

[Surreptitiousness]

Charles Matthews wrote:
>
> I can't go into private discussions I know about, obviously. I've 
> several times made public my view that we should give admins plenty of 
> discretion, and balance that by a small number of de-sysops. So I agree 
> pretty much with what you say. "Sympathy" needs to be in the way of a 
> full understanding of the job description, not in continuing admins who 
> really don't match that description. The counter-argument, though, is 
> that the "community" will not accept certain tough decisions; in other 
> words there will be some adverse comment. Sometimes there is much more 
> to these situations than meets the eye.
>
>
>   

At some point the arbitration committee is going to have to make tough 
decisions, if only to see exactly where the chips fall. If the 
arbitration committee is sometimes afraid of acting, what hope have we 
got? David brought up the idea of forking again, and maybe that's what 
we need to explore once again, maybe we do need to investigate a fork of 
the project. Tying this into the Guardian article, maybe a fork would 
protect us somewhat from the fears it provokes.  After all, Wikipedia 
was originally a project to write an enecyclopedia for another project.  
Why not investigate establishing a new Wikipedia to write articles for 
us? Alternatively, how about instigating a "standard article" process, 
tag everything in the current database as standard, and then allow new 
articles to be created with a huge template at the top to the effect of 
buyer beware, this article does not meet Wikipedia Standards, and relax 
"some" of the rules on those articles until they lose the template. Nah, 
too radical. I mean, rather than delete articles, we could just 
sub-standardise them.  And at a stroke we'd have an instant defence 
against all those media stories; "but why are you taking it seriously, 
we told you it's a draft".