Wikibook User Arbitration

I have lothed the day that this would be necessary, but Wikibooks has 
now gone to a formal user arbitration situation.

For details, see:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Arbitration/Panic2k4_vs._SBJohnny

I have agreeed to step in here in terms of trying to resolve this 
situation.  Panic hasn't been doing blatant vandalism, but he has been 
making it tough (apparently) to edit the C++ Programming Wikibook and 
has made a few enemies and a few others who are upset over his editorial 
style.

In an attempt to formalize this discussion and try to bring some order 
here, and to keep this from spilling into areas like policy pages to 
legislate the behavior of Panic out of existance, this has really turned 
into a judicial situation instead.  Both that, and this situation is 
quickly approaching the level of blatant wheel warring, and I want to 
nip that right away to keep it from happening.

Yes, this is perhaps a little more complicated than the Wikipedia 
arbitration.  OK, that is intentional in this situation, as I would like 
to set this up in such a way that you don't want to go through this meat 
grinder if at all possible.  Arbitration is clearly the last and final 
resort beyond trying to pull in people from outside of the project to 
make very arbitrary decisions based on very incomplete information.  I 
certainly don't want to see Jimbo, Anthere, or Erik having to get 
involved here being pressured to act when they won't know what is going 
on in the first place.  I know I have had to ask around a bit and work 
hard to even see if there is a case to be made here at all.

It is my hope that these arbitration/mediation cases are very, very 
rare.  I'm trying hard to stay objective here as well, and am leaving 
most of what is said to the discussion pages above.

Once all of this has been more or less resolved, I hope that we can come 
up with the formal arbitration guidelines that have been discussed now 
for more than a year on Wikibooks.  I guess that until a situation like 
this came up, there wasn't a percieved need to get this put together.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning