At 11:47 AM 6/17/2008, 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. Any one of the 1100 or so
active administrators can delete material, tc. etc. and no one can
overturn it without a definite community consensus. any one of the
1100 can be as arbitrary as he pleases, and get away with it unless
the community is willing to actually actively oppose him. Thus, the
bias will be towards removing material--which perhaps is what some
people want with BLPs. Tell me, what would the reaction be if a
proposal were mooted that any one of the 1100 administrators could
mark BLP material as being kept, and could not be opposed without
similar agreement?
It looks to me like ArbComm has gone totally mad. But I didn't read
the arbitration. It's one thing to protect an article at the drop of
a hat, and BLP policy would allow an admin to protect, in this case,
to "a preferred version," but the proposal goes way beyond that.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a "definite community consensus" arise on
Wikipedia. We don't have procedures for determining that; rather we
have an escalating response process that is not designed for crisp decisions.