On 11/12/2010 17:21, Daniel R. Tobias wrote: > On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:17:36 -0500, Anthony wrote: > >> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 12:02 AM, Steve Bennett<stevag...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 10:15 PM, David Gerard<dger...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> Ensure that (administrators|wardens|whatever we decide to call them) feel >>>> no qualms >>>> about>kicking out clearly disruptive people. >>> If it was clear to everyone who the disruptive people were, there >>> would never be any problems. But one person's troll is another >>> person's misunderstood genius. >> It doesn't have to be clear to everyone, just to the people in charge. > ...if you favor a top-down authoritarian model in which nobody > outside a small ruling clique has any say in things. And if any of > the rabble object to that, just call them trolls too and kick them > out as well. > Interestingly (for some of us) that authoritarian model has had a bad couple of years, in some senses. Or perhaps not, depending on your perspective.
Two or three years ago I was much more in the thick of things, and I remember telling a rather bemused American at dinner at the Alexandria Wikimania about the four political parties on enWP. With that as my baseline, things have shifted somewhat. ArbCom itself is "doing a Jimbo" - holding itself in reserve from acting more in public than it has to, and dealing with much mail in private. This is no bad thing in itself, and I of course having been there understand the reason. (Not many people know that I once posted to the arbwiki an analysis of incoming mail into 11 types - well ahead of my time there.) Leaving the field open for AN/I to be the main centre of overt authority, with serious disadvantages in some cases. Of course AN/I is not a "cabal", but an unchartered process and free-for-all. What of those "parties"? Naming no names, except perhaps Dan's since he belongs to party D in my book, and Tony's since he at least belonged to party B, there were parties A and B of the (authoritarian) right, and parties C (my natural home, surprisingly to some), and D (extreme free speechers) on the (permissive) left. For a while the main conflicts were A with D, B with C, and A and B were at daggers drawn. In other words in the so-called authoritarian or pre-Obama era up to the 2008 ArbCom elections, the right was split. Parties A and B emerged somewhat battered, but basically A has rebuilt and B hasn't. Party C is going strong but turns out not to have any real reforming ideas. The Ds were always a noisy fringe not doing much but take WR way, way too seriously. So that's everyone card marked, then. I notice that people on enWP talk at the top of their rhetorical voices still, making themselves ridiculous just for effect, in my view. Reactivity and ranting in the world according to AN/I, and random decisions can be taken. I'm no longer interested in the police work, as I told David Gerard early in 2009. Other stuff to do. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l