[WikiEN-l] Oversized criticism sections and WP:UNDUE (was: Notability and ski resorts)

[Charles Matthews]

Surreptitiousness wrote:
> I've always lamented the fact that people have no idea what arbitration 
> means on Wikipedia.  That's one of the biggest reasons why arb-com is 
> such a failure, no-one ever treats its decisions as final. Arb-com 
> doesn't have to legislate, that's not its purpose.  Its purpose is to 
> hear complaints and arbitrate them.  It started going wrong when people 
> started expecting it to behave like a court or a policeman.
Arbcom has been around for about five years, with dozens of people 
involved, and much change of personnel. Two basic types of criticism are:

(a) (Demagogue) Arbcom has changed too much from its intended role, 
pushing for power to order people around as Jimbo pulled back from 
day-to-day management;

or

(b) (Armchair General) If I were on Arbcom, I'd see that some 
fundamental issues about behaviour on the site were tackled in a 
purposeful way. As it is, Arbcom just tinkers with a few of the worst 
disputes, and can't make major change in what is basically a holding 
operations.

Since enWP has changed almost beyond recognition since 2004, what is 
more remarkable to me is that Arbcom is roughly what it always was, even 
with a completely different bunch of people running it. The limitations 
appear to be that what is distinctive about Arbitation (evidence-led 
decision-making rather than threaded discussion) scales only as far as 
supporting offsite discussions do (i.e. Arbcom has no physical meetings, 
so its committee work is by threaded discussion which is a lousy way to 
get quick decisions made sensibly).

What was good about the earlier years of Arbcom was that innovation in 
remedies and clarification of policies in terms of the decisions that 
would be taken to enforce them cleared up quite a number of issues that 
now rarely need to get into RfAr. That kind of innovation as "crafting" 
decisions to the needs of the site ceased to have so much (new) traction 
a couple of years ago.

Charles