[WikiEN-l] A modest proposal - a recap of resolution-l

[Charles Matthews]

stevertigo wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 11:46 PM, Charles
> Matthews<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>   
>> Oh, have it your own way, then. It just looked, superficially, as if you
>> were dead set on alienating large numbers of people, spamming lists,
>> creating personal frictions and all that.
>>     
>
> I understand that I have a created a special niche for myself here. I
> also understand exactly what most concerns and troubles the
> bureaucratic mindset. But note that none of this "spamming" would have
> been necessary back in Jimbo's day - when anything came up he did his
> best to give straight and insightful answers to almost anyone.
>   
Hmm, it might save time if you sent an email to Jimbo, so you could get 
his straight and insightful "no" to the idea of resolution-l. Or even 
his very direct and trenchany "yes".
>   
>> The thing is, if you are going to call up the "old days" precedents,
>> then it will not do to invoke a partial and sepia-tinted version. There
>> are several things we (I'm also an old-school Wikipedian) worked out
>> then, including the idea that "Wikipedia is not a battleground". There
>> are certainly people who continue to act as if it is.
>>     
>
> Excellent points, sir. But how would opening up and centralizing one
> small aspect of dispute resolution - dedicated discussion of DR itself
> - decrease the peace in any way?
>   
Given your announced intentions for it, I think it is reasonable to 
assume that it is ground of your own choosing for a battle with the Sith 
Lords of Arbitration.
>   
>>  It is all very well to get worked up about glasnost' issues - we saw a lot of that in
>> the last election.
>>     
>
> I know nothing of the last election - I only get involved in these
> things when I think that things have become too obviously warped for
> anyone else to deal with. If you could give us a little of your own
> project historian overview of what you are talking about - just for
> the record - that would be rather interesting too.
>   
So it turns out you don't vote for or against arbs? You are in the 
majority, since turnout hardly reaches 20%. But it rather undercuts your 
premise.

The 2008 election (and you'll forgive me if I keep this at a general 
level) was rather Obamamatic, in that many people were voting for the 
general principle of change rather than specifics of how Arbitration 
could be improved, procedurally or at the level of what type of person 
should be an arb. The Gorbachev reference is therefore to try to get 
away from the idea that US politics is the only valid type of 
comparison. It is also slyly implying that you can end up with Putin, a 
KGB man, whatever the sloganising. I happen to think that requests for 
things to be more "open" can be queried: there is plenty of private mail 
that should remain private because it is either (a) about private life 
details that have no bearing on the encyclopedia, but come up because 
voluntary work tends to drag private matters into the workplace, or (b) 
horse-trading and straw polls which are part of the proper work of a 
committee. In fact Arbitration cases generate acres of material showing 
how decisions are made; and in most cases (not all) what appears on the 
wiki is at least a fair record of how a decision was reached.

>   
>> A rolling manifesto of abusing anyone connected with
>> Arbitration is not actually any kind of solution to anything.
>>     
>
> The fact remains that dispute resolution functions need to be more
> open. If Arbcom and perhaps even Foundation (hm) actually functioned
> fully in accord with their own stated principles or values, then there
> would be no issue with concepts like transparency. 

That's it: sentence 1 says this is about glasnsost'. And sentence 2 
appears just to be false, IMX.

Charles