sannse wrote:
Is the arbitration committee going to make up their
numbers by finding a
replacement for Uninvited Company?
If so, can I suggest (in an annoyingly PC way) that the new member is a
woman. As far as I know there are no women on the arbitration committee and
I see no harm in balancing this a little.
Perhaps it shows my political leanings, but I don't really like that
approach. Certainly we should have all opinions represented, and if
certain opinions are only represented by women, then we should have
women represented. But we should represent all opinions, not based on
simple categorizations like gender, race, etc.---you can't assume that
someone has certain personality or characteristics because they're
female, or male, or hispanic, or whatnot (certainly most people I know
offline don't follow the stereotypes, and many fit 'opposite' roles
better). As far as wikipedia goes, things like inclusionist vs.
deletionist, pro- vs. anti-banning, etc., are all more relevant
distinctions by at least an order of magnitude.
So if there's a woman on the arbitration committee (or multiple women),
it should be because of who they are, not just because we wanted to
throw a token woman on there. Which, fortunately, is how Wikipedia
normally works---I often can't tell if someone is male or female until
it gets mentioned long after I've interacted with them for a while, and
there's some surprises (for whatever reason, I thought that evercat was
female, and that anthere was male).
And, FWIW, we allowed *everyone* on a committee who wanted to be on
one. So at the moment the reason there are no women is because no women
volunteered. If someone wants to volunteer, male or female, we could
use an extra member to keep the numbers at the right level, so talk to
Mr. Wales asap. =]
-Mark