Wily D wrote:
On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 12:57 PM, Delirium
<delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
This is a proposal that will encourage
administrators to not act
responsibly, by destroying the principle that an administrative action
can be overturned by another administrator.
That's in fact one of the core assumptions of administratorship, and
the
reason we keep emphasizing that it's "no big deal". Being an
administrator *must not* give anyone unilateral special powers---only
give them janitorial tasks, that anyone else can undo if there wasn't
community consensus for the original change. Such a huge policy change
change is a significant overstep of the Arbitration Committee's
authority, and therefore cannot be regarded as binding.
-Mark
It can be regarded as binding in the sense that at the moment if you
don't comply with it, you'll be desysoped or banned (or, not xor).
It depends on the situation. The Arbitration Committee is only empowered
to resolve specific disputes; their dispute-resolution does not
literally create precedent in some legalistic sense, although it can be
used as an indication of how similar disputes might be resolved in the
future, barring a change in sentiment or committee membership, and may
also influence how community consensus operates. To go from a ruling in
a specific case to actual general policy applying to all people, though,
requires the usual policy-creation consensus step. For example, the
Arbitration Committee banned a few people for excessive edit-warring,
but it did not invent the 3-revert-rule--- that was done through a
separate community process which turned the Arbitration Committee's bans
for excessive edit-warring in a few specific cases into a general policy
outlining what precisely is prohibited.
In this case, I think it's fair to say that the Arbitration Committee's
ruling has not been accepted by consensus of the community as a general
policy to be applied in other cases, and so anyone banning a person not
directly involve in the case based on the "precedent" would be
overstepping their authority as an administrator.
-Mark