Cliques considered anti-wiki?

Peter wrote on WikiEN-l:
>Just happened to read these two messages one after 
>another and felt it necessary to respond. I personally 
>think the introduction of such "super-sysops" would be 
>unnecessarily anti-wiki in its intent. It also a bit of a slap 
>in the face to the dozens of users who've made thousands 
>of edits each without getting it an edit war or NPOV 
>dispute, but go rather unnoticed compared with the 
>higher-profile policy-makers rather article-writers.

How is it a slap in the face? All that was proposed was the establishment of a 
way to resolve disputes through arbitration after more informal methods of 
conflict resolution have failed (Erik incorrectly called that "mediation"). 
Those people who are interested could work on that (via being appointed by 
Jimbo or a future Wikimedia board or even *cringe* voting) while those people 
who are not interested in that can work on other things (including plain old 
informal mediation; which itself needs to be improved around here). 

Something has to be done to stop the constant edit waring, disregard for NPOV 
and winning-by-being-the-most-persistant that pervades many of our more 
controversial subject areas. So I guess you can say that I happen to like 
Erik's proposal (just need to switch "mediation" with "arbitration" and need 
to beef-up our current mediation process to minimize the number of cases that 
have to go to arbitration). 

The content is what matters most here. So if the way we run our community is 
contributing to a breakdown of neutrality and quality in our content, then we 
need to make some modifications. 

Wiki is a means to an end, not an end in itself. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)