QUOTE(Doc glasgow @ Sun 6th December 2009, 10:46am)
Change the policy (no you don't have the power to do it - but do it anyway). Lead and many of us will follow. threaten to resign en masse unless the community agrees some way forward in six weeks. You can focus minds, or you can at least try.
The problem with this idea is that most of the people on ArbCom are there because they enjoy the political gaming that goes with being there. It's not about having and using power; most of them know that using their power too brazenly openly will lead to losing it. It's about the game itself, and the privileged position within the game that goes with their rank. Orchestrating a mass resignation threat just isn't consistent with that; resigning is what you do when you've already lost the game, and threatening to resign just isn't a valid move. It would be rather like a soldier on the battlefield threatening to kill himself unless the enemy agrees to back down.
For many people, Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia project, it's a complicated role playing game, and must be analyzed and treated as such. The encyclopedia is, at best, secondary.
Of course, there's also people who are attempting to win the game in the hopes of using the power they think will come with winning the game to control what the encyclopedia says. For the most part, they will find that their efforts are in vain: winning the game doesn't let you control what the encyclopedia says. There are ways to influence what the encyclopedia says, and playing the game is related to that, but those two systems interact in complicated ways and neither is subordinated to the other.