On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 7:29 PM, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am not too keen on a policy RFC. Not that I oppose it but I do not believe > we had enough preliminary discussion to come up with a decent proposal. A > policy RFC would get shot down almost instantly. > As for the RFAR comment. Arbcom has proven themselves to be useless in this > dispute. They went out of their way not to resolve the dispute. They are > first class in establishing "findings of fact" but are dead last when it > comes in doing something about those "facts" they found...
One of my reasons (not stated at the time) for recusing from that case request that was ultimately not accepted was because I believe this kind of issue is best handled at the article and policy level and that work is needed on devising processes that work to bring large-scale change to policies and guidelines slowly but surely through the system, with the full input of the community throughout the process. Just a few basic principles for all such discussions of proposed changes would be: 1) Take things slowly - rushing will derail the process, moving slower ensures long-term stability 2) Draft a set of changes that reflect changes in actual practice 3) Advertise the proposed changes properly - this is no longer trivial on Wikipedia due to the project size 4) Provide a proposed overall timetable at the start, flexible enough to get broad support 5) Allow input and changes and full discussion at each stage - discuss and edit, do not vote 6) Judge the right times in the process to move from drafting to polling and back 7) Be prepared to repeat each stage several times and endure lots of hard work and false starts 8) Monitor the progress in terms of participation (growing numbers after each stage is good, declining numbers is bad) 9) Final straw poll to determine acceptance must have widespread advertisement and clear timetable for start and end 10) Neutral person or group of people need to be found to close the whole process and declare a result 11) Celebrate or prepare to start a new round of editing the proposal With many refinements from experiences other people have had of such processes. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
