QUOTE(everyking @ Sun 12th July 2009, 10:24am)
Glad to see them go. How about the remaining arbitrators acknowledge the overwhelming community opposition to this council and instead speak in favor of the community adoption of a proposal that would lead to the election of a serious reforms committee?
The most sound reason to reject the proposal in my view is the calibre of its selectors (en masse, not individually). I sort of operate from the general principle that if a body is performing its core duties effectively, it might then be trusted with other duties. The 2009 ArbCom is performing its core duties so poorly that it should focus on getting those right first without moving onto irrelevant sidetracks which will probably take their attention even further off the task. It's been my observation that they tend to "gloss over" cases, fail to read the evidence pages properly or properly investigate leads and are too willing to hit the nuclear option, and have driven several good apolitical editors off the project this way - broadly speaking previous ArbComs did an acceptable job at these things but too slowly and too conservatively for the community's liking.
There are plenty of frustrated editors and admins with serious questions about the current ArbCom's competency who'd like to see the decks cleared. However, that would likely not fix the problem as you'd have to replace them with other people, and the most capable volunteers we have are with some notable exceptions either gone, burnt out or not interested.
The process set up reminds me of a Sam Goldwyn quote: "I don't want to be surrounded by "yes men". I want people who'll disagree with me, even if it costs them their jobs." Creating a body which is then answerable only to it has slightly Tsarist-Russia connotations to me, although the whole notion of ArbCom having any real world parallel or significance is quite funny. That Colbert clip making fun of their names pretty much said where it was at (IMG:
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Personally I think a *proper* advisory council would go well beyond Wikimedians and extend to universities and business and such things, so that we don't end up in a self-reinforcing circle of opinions of increasing irrelevance to the real world, but I could see the anarchists and conservatives in the Wikipedia community lining up to howl that one down and insist it was a takeover by Big Business of the people's enterprise or somesuch.
This post has been edited by Orderinchaos: