Re: Wikibook User Arbitration

On 1/4/07, Robert Scott Horning <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.

*Sigh* it was only a matter of time. Get a bunch of people working
together, and people will suddenly not want to work together for
whatever reason :-/

I have not looked at the current issue (in fact, this is the first
time I have heard of it. But I feel that in this specific case,
community consensus may be a bad thing. Eventually, there may be
groups of users vs other groups of users. Maybe Jimbo or some other
person would have to step in there.

Oy, this is a whole new can-o-worms in Wikibooks policy...

--Dragontamer