Re: Wikibook User Arbitration

Andrew Whitworth wrote:

>> I know Wikibooks is not Wikipedia, but the policies simply
>> havn't been established at all for Wikibooks on this topic.
>
>
> If this case wasn't happening, what do you think are the odds that the 
> wikibooks community would accept an Arbcom, or create a policy on the 
> matter? If you look through the list of rejected policies (you can 
> find them on [[WB:PAG]]) you will see that the community has already 
> rejected a proposed creation of a mediation committee (which is far 
> less imposing then an arbitration committee). Using arbitration in 
> this case is essentially an attempt to shotgun the creation of such a 
> mechanism into practice, when the community at large generally doesnt 
> need or want it.
>
Part of the reason for the rejection was that so many policies have been 
discussed, that many people (myself included) felt that we didn't need 
to create more policies just for the sake of having policies.  The 
arbitration policy that was originally proposed was quite complicated. 
 I'm still not sure if Wikibooks has enough users to justify a full 
standing ArbCom at the moment, although there do appear to be enough 
administrators who are active that such an ad-hoc group could be put 
together if the situation is warrented.  The final wording of the policy 
at [[Wikibooks:Ad hoc administration committee]] is more common sense 
anyway, and not necessarily something that needs to be stated as a 
formal policy in order to be effective.

BTW, this is a far cry from the position we had on Wikibooks about a 
year and a half ago, when there was effectively only a single active 
administrator for the whole project.  That we are talking about 
administrators with significant differences of opinions here and 
multiple admins, with users who aren't even administrators but are none 
the less very active Wikibookians is a very pleasant situation to be in 
all around.  [[Special:Log/rights]] shows a huge growth of Wikibooks 
from the prespective that we are finally able to get some decent 
infrastructure into the Wikibooks project that has been been missing 
from when it first started.

Wikibooks is also growing to the point that I don't necessarily know 
each of the active users that are now participating.  The days of 
reading the recent changes log just to see if anybody cared to 
contribute to Wikibooks are now over.  That is now a firehose of 
information.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning