[WikiEN-l] Rules, expertise, and encyclopedic standards

Tue Mar 8 02:09:41 UTC 2005

Daniel Mayer maveric149 at yahoo.com wrote:

"But having a separate standing committee would be redundant, especially due 
to the fact that any one case will likely involve accusations of breaking 
both content and behavioral policies and guidelines."

Not necessarily. Two committees would has separate jurisdictions with the 
right to accept and act on the cases that are sent to them according to 
their own rules and procedures. The new committee would handle disputes over 
articles concerning content (No original research, Cite sources, NPOV, 
Verifiability, et. al.); the existing committee, however, was born with and 
will always have an emphasis on behavioral policies.

For the sake of argument, even if the existing committee will be able to 
start handling everything, it seems likely to be quite slow and cumbersome. 
Calling on academics and and professionals as 'fact finders' may boost its 
capacity, but it still takes a great deal of time to call on fact checkers, 
wait for them to assemble, wait for them to deliberate, wait for them to 
reach an opinion, assess their opinion, and then decide how to act on it. A 
great deal of time will be consumed just by waiting for the current 
arbitrators and the 'fact finders' to communicate with each other. However, 
by specializing in certain policy areas, two committees would bring in more 
people with more authority to work more expeditiously in the areas in which 
they specialize.

The idea of convening special panels of non-involved people for certain 
cases is great and I fully support it. While I think that a second mechanism 
would work better, Mav's ideas are at least a step in the right direction, 
and they're better than nothing.

-172

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