QUOTE(Somey @ Sat 11th July 2009, 9:55pm)
The last thing you'd want to do is have the list of invitees determined by a popularity contest, because being popular on WP means not being a curmudgeon or activist. I'm not saying this is a worthwhile idea, but these people calling for the group to be "elected by the community" are probably just pissed that they themselves weren't invited in the first place.
For myself, if they'd asked me I'd have declined (and I'd be shocked if Slim, the noisiest anti at present,
wasn't invited). I don't see the problem so much being the "unelected" side, as the complete confusion as to what this group is actually going to
do. Nobody so far has actually said what the purpose of this group is (the
current statement of purpose seems to boil down to "bitch about things but with no powers to do anything about them"); as I've already said, this looks to me like an attempt to shut Jimmy Wales's noisier critics up by giving them posts on the metaphorical payroll. As far as I'm concerned, "
the community can shut down the "think tank" aspects […] but it can't prevent ArbCom from coming to the people in the group for advice without shutting down ArbCom itself" sums up the "fuck you, if you don't like this we'll just take it to IRC and do it anyway" mentality quite nicely. The problem is, any legitimate criticism coming from this group's members will be tainted by having come from a source with no legitimacy (even in Wikipedia's own dubious definition of 'consensus'), while any shitty ideas coming from it will be treated with a seriousness they don't deserve, by virtue of having come from Jimbo's private corps of Illuminati.
I did
not see
this coming.