The pile-on is an undignified spectacle that has nothing to do with creating a scholarly encyclopedia and degrades everyone concerned.

Though for outsiders, they can make an amusing read. This old Snowspinner (Phil Sandifer) election campaign really warms the cockles. And to think he ran again (twice?) afterwards.

Well, Brad seems to feel it necessary to remind him not to appoint jdforrester or CharlesMatthews. Make of that what you will.

On the other hand, the den of drama-seeking fools showing up on User_talk:Jimbo will serve to make Jimbo look like less of an idiot in comparison.

Jimbo has already hinted he'll appoint more than seven, anyway, so the way the vote has gone may help him.

Luke, Jimbo wants his T-Shirt back, or you don't get to be on Arbcom.

I hypothesize that Jimbo is actually disappointed that The Community didn't make any patently unreasonable choices. The way he was talking before the election, I think he was spoiling for the chance to overrule The Community.

You know, I think what bothers me the most about this is that Jimbo plainly has no understanding of what a consitutional monarch is. It would actually bother me much less if he likened himself to a pre-constitutional but generally benignly-negligent monarch, which would be far more apt.

All of that said, he'll definitely appoint the top seven. He might appoint more (though I'd bet against it), but he'll definitely appoint the top seven.

Running a non-profit enterprise as a constitutional monarchy is just bat-shit crazy. That it would be seriously entertained, with people lining up to participate, is just as crazy.

Mine is

Well, hold on - the non-profit isn't claimed to be run as a constitutional monarchy; I imagine to attempt that would violate some provision of the statute under which it was incorporated. The non-profit's run by a Board of Trustees. Jimbo has likened his role on the Wikipedia project, as a web community-run project under the ultimate jurisdiction of the non-profit, to that of a constitutional monarch, and has subsequently made comments indicating that he doesn't understand how constitutional monarchies work. That's my complaint, in this narrow instance.

So it is only a constitutional monarchy in relation to the treatment of the organization's volunteers, who are responsible for the creation of "encyclopedic content", which is the only outcome of any potential value generated by the enterprise? As for WMFs other activities, such as the office Christmas party and tours of the Jimmy Wales Memorial Awards Wall and Photo Gallery it run just like any other normal non-profit?

I just wasn't sure from what angle you were saying that it was insane to run a non-profit as a constitutional monarchy. Its legal obligations, financial decisions, etc. don't fall under the constitutional monarchy category, and those are the things I think of when I here "running a non-profit".

Besides that, it's the nature of a constitutional monarchy that the monarch isn't functionally all that relevant, so I don't think it's fair to say that running anything as a constitutional monarchy is necessarily insane; whether it's insane depends on the constitution.

The WMF does not generally consider the editors of the various projects to be "WMF volunteers". As far as I can tell, the WMF's take on the relationship is that each project is a separate, distinct, unincorporated organization that has chosen to avail itself of the WMF's services. As such, the WMF has no direct authority over, nor responsibility to, the organizations that are responsible for and govern the several projects. The only time I've seen the WMF even remotely suggest that project editors are "WMF volunteers" has been in fundraising entreatises.

Nor does the WMF deliver anything to the volunteers other than servers and some software maintenance - and some waffle on news programmes (when they can't get some Australian thongster to do it for them). English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia might be self-sufficient by some definitions, but if they are serious about Simple English, for example, you'd think the WMF would see the need for some nurturing.

Gawd, Steve, you have a short memory - I gave you some pointers about article writing a while back...

This is a correct description of WMF's "position" on their relationship with Wikipedia's editors. This is, from a laibility standpoint, very good for WMF and very bad for editors, especially the admins. When shit meets fan it is likely that WMF's position will be contested, possibly from multiple quarters.

Do I know you?


This might truly be the best solution. Let's hope he comes up with something similar.

Oh yeah! *headdesks* Sorry!

..and I have used teh little {{vo}} template a few times, nice one.

Jayvdb, one of the successful candidates, made some very bold and intelligent comments on Jimbo's talk page, amidst the discussion on Jimbo's period of reflection:

"There is no Jimbo mail in my inbox. We are supposed to be an agile web 2.0 crowdsourcing thingamawatsit, and here we are waiting 5 days for a bog simple decision from a board member after a 14 day election has been held by the community. This delay is unreasonable, and is an example of the "Jimbo problem" that a large segment of the community is growing dissatisfied with. Other projects manage just fine without a constitutional monarch. If you wanted to put an inordinate amount of time into evaluating and reflecting, you should have kept these days clear in your calendar; the dates have been well advertised for a long time, and this sudden revelation puts other peoples calendars into a state of limbo."

"I also hope Jimbo doesnt get inventive. The tactical nature of the voting meant that the community was focused on top seven. If there is a need for change, and I am partial to having a bigger committee, it should be discussed within the community before hand, and the community should know what they are voting on. If we do want more people on the committee this year, the appropriate way to handle that is to decide the seven who will be appointed to the committee now, and consider anyone with 50% or higher as eligible for appointment if/when the community has discussed that thoroughly."

Now I regret not voting for this guy. Sorry, John!

Meanwhile, tensions flare on Jimbo's talk page.



Yeah. The Essjay Controversy (T-H-L-K-D), where Jimbo unilaterally appointed a guy to Arbcom he already knew was a phony and had lied to the media about his position in order to promote WP. Lets hope Jimbo's legendary "careful reflection" stops anything else like that "slipping through the cracks again"!

I don't recall that Jimbo already knew this.

I'm pretty sure he did. He appointed him to Arbcom when Essjay got the role at Wikia, while other Arbitrators disapproved but didn't voice their concerns.

According to Wikipedia itself.



Update: Essjay was taken on by Wikia on January 7th 2007, and revealed his ID to Wikia and Wales and co then. And was later appointed to arbitration committee on February 23rd 2007. I think they had more than one meeting in between - some big meal or other was mentioned.

There is no question - Wales knew.

Jimbo needs time to find out what he can get away without withing offending too many of what he thinks of as the stakeholders, the people who he feels that he needs to keep on his good side. Once he's determined what course of action is safest, he'll take it.

One thing you have to remember about Jimbo is that he's a coward. He hates taking risks; he will try to convince someone else to take them if he can, and will defer action as long as possible to try to figure out what the safest course is before acting. At this point, he's waiting for his inner circle to chime in on how many more Arbitrators he should create, and which of the candidates he should choose to fill those roles. It's unlikely that he'll fail to seat any of the top seven (although I am sure that there are many pressuring him to find an excuse to fail to seat Cool Hand Luke); the question becomes how he chooses the supplementals.

I imagine he's a bit ticked that he really can't get away with reappointing James; with his extremely poor showing in the election it would almost certainly engender a great deal of ill will if he were to try to appoint him anyway. With any luck, James will get the hint and fade away from Wikipedia entirely; both he and Wikipedia will be the better for it.

I agree but I doubt it would have done him any good. I'm pretty sure he just scuppered any chance he had of being appointed. Candidates who refuse to fly south should take the sparrow's lesson, at least until their eggs are hatched.



Special thanks to Bill Hicks (RIP)

Remaining in a state of jimbo for five days is rather disconcerting.

Enter Moulton with Jimmy Cliff parody.

This one's easy...

Sitting here in Limbo
Waiting for the tide turn.
Yeah, now, sitting here in Limbo,
So many things I've got to learn.
Meanwhile, they're putting up a resistance,
But I know that my faith will lead me on.

Traveling around with Jimbo
Waiting for the dice to roll.
Yeah, now, sitting here in Limbo,
Still got some time to search my soul.
Meanwhile, they're putting up a ruckus,
But I know that my faith will lead me on.

I don't know where life will take me,
But I know where I have been.
I don't know what life will show me,
But I know what I have seen.
Tried my hand at love and friendship,
That is past and gone.
And now it's time to move along.

Sitting here in Limbo
Like a bird ain't got a song.
Yeah, I'm waiting here on Jimbo
And I know it won't be long
'Til I make my getaway, now.
Meanwhile, they're putting up a resistance,
But I know that my faith will lead me on.

I don't know where life will take me,
But I know where I have been.
I don't know what life will show me,
But I know the London Fetish Scene.
Tried my hand at love and kinship,
That is past and gone.
And now it's time to sing a song.

Gonna lead me on now.
Meanwhile, they're putting up resistance,
But I know that my faith will lead me on.
Sitting in Limbo, Limbo, Limbo.
Waiting on Jimbo, Jimbo, Jimbo.
Sitting in Limbo, Limbo, Limbo.
Meanwhile, they're putting up a ruckus,
But I know that my leash will lead me on.

Arbcom in a State of Jimbo news update.

Arbcom in a State of Jimbo news update.

Knowing Wikipedia's luck, India and Pakistan will go to war and Jimbo will never be able to release his decision about ArbCom as he will be trapped in India.

The Community will have to decide itself!

Oh, and on a side note, it would be really bad if India and Pakistan went to war.

I'm afraid that's simply wrong.

A constitutional monarchy simply means a monarchy in which the monarch's powers are limited by the constitution. The monarch may indeed have, and personally exercise, immense powers in law. They are simply not an absolute monarch (which is a monarch above the law - who's power is unlimited).

Britain has been unequivocally a constitutional monarchy since 1689. (Indeed arguably earlier - since Magna Carta in England, and the declaration of Arbroath in Scotland.) In 1689 William and Mary renounced the Stuart claims to absolutism by accepting the Bill and Claim of rights. However, in law and in fact, the constitutional monarch retained full executive powers, including direct control over foreign policy, government spending, the military. All they couldn't do was pass laws, raises taxes, or throw people in prison without Parliament or the courts.

If you mean "titular monarch who exercises no real power" that's simply one type of constitutional monarchy that emerged in the UK gradually, principally during and since the mid-19th century.

There endeth the lesson in constitutional law.

Don't stop there, Scott. Draw the parallels between the evolution of concepts such as the Rule of Law, Due Process, Civil Rights, Ethical Governance, etc, as recorded in the annals of human history and where Wikipedia is in that same evolution.

Yes, you're absolutely correct, I was being unduly Commonwealth-centric, and I knew better.

But at least I know the difference between "whose" and "who's".

Funny, I would have thought the appropriate response to "you can work for nothing and I will be your constitutional monarch" would not be to discuss the details, history and nature of constitutional monarchy but would call instead for a firm "piss off."

As I've said before, I edit Wikipedia because I enjoy it. The moment I stop, I'll leave. I don't mind if somebody else profits from my hobby any more than I do for any of my other hobbies, most of which cause somebody else to profit. I'm under no illusions about my Wikipedia activities being altruistically motivated (besides, altruism is evil - read Rand).

I will assume your suggestion about reading Rand was a joke, or else you're more of a hardcore Wikipedian than I ever imagined.

Your assumption is correct. My experience with Ayn Rand was limited to once in high school when I was going to enter an essay contest put on by some group (The Ayn Rand Institute? Does that exist?) for which I had to read Anthem. I finished it, concluded that this women had rather a large bee in her bonnet about anything not selfishly individualistic, and decided not to enter the contest. Actually, in my knowledge of philosophy, I'm probably about as close to the opposite of Kurt "intimately acquainted with the entire history of western thought" Weber as you can get. Westminster-style parliamentary democracies, on the other hand, I like to think I'm hot shit with, until Doc catches me saying something stupid.

If you know the story of King Henry and Becket, or the story of King John and Stephen Langton, you know two of the more remarkable dramas regarding the challenge of educating idiotic monarchs.

I actually prefer Lewis Carroll's version, featuring the Red Queen and Alice (partly because almost everyone knows it).

Alice failed to reform the Red Queen. Alice ultimately gave up, dismissing them as "nothing but a pack of cards" and then woke up from her Kafkaesque nightmare.

I am fascinated by the long unsolved problem of educating jackbooted Machiavellian control phreaks. In the 20th Century there were multiple examples of this recurring failure. In all, that failure cost some 200 million lives in the century just ended.

In all likelihood, Jimbo is no more educable than the Red Queen, and it would be the height of hubris to imagine than any of us would have more success than Alice or Stephen Langton or Thomas Becket.

But even though failure is in the cards (so to speak), I still hope to gain some insights by studying this curious instance of the Red Queen and her sycophantic pack of cards.

You might actually enjoy The Fountainhead as (of course) fiction. Rand wasn't entirely wrong-- there are idea-thieves out there and the free-content free-culture wars we're having on the internet are the same old battle people have been trying to work out for centuries. For example, I look at the death of Napster and the rise of iTunes and say: "Hey, were's iArticles and how come no micropayments?" JSTOR is not what's needed. So this stuff is all topical. And if you look at copyright vs. patent you can see that the storytellers and the politicians really have managed to screw engineers pretty thoroughly. All this, Rand forsaw.

As for Atlas Shrugged, it needs (and didn't have) a good editor. By that time, Rand was far off the handle, and wouldn't let anybody touch it. Individualism of course has severe limitations; one of which being that you don't listen when other people are trying to tell you that you've being boring.

Her characters are basically two dimensional cartoons. Either they are evil shills or ubber-noble geniuses. All of the dialog is conducted by characters who sound like they have sticks up their asses. Even Gary Copper couldn't make her dialog work, and that was in the film of the somewhat less terrible Fountainhead.

All you say is true, but if you like comic books or Batman movies, you still may enjoy it.

The only thing I disagree with is that even Gary Cooper couldn't make the dialog work. Cooper was not the world's greatest actor, nor exactly an intellectual. He admitted that he didn't fully realize what the novel was driving at, until he saw the whole movie, complete with own finished rendition of the pivotal courtroom monolog. Well, one thing that can be said about Cooper is that he was honest.

Jimbo has, of course, specifically compared his role to that of the Queen in the modern-day UK, so all this seems moot.

The Red Queen was part of the chess set in Through the Looking Glass. Shemight have been the one who tried to believe three impossible things before breakfast. The "nothing but a pack of cards" quote is from the end of the trial scene in Alice in Wonderland, where the Queen of Hearts has a habit of commanding "Off with his head!"

Arbcom in a State of Jimbo update.

I guess he'll be appointing eight now that Deskana is resigning. Even though I opposed #8 (Carcharoth), I think the fair thing would be to appoint the top eight.

Didn't Jimbo wait nearly a month last year to post the winners?

All I know is that I expect some fascinating insights from Jimbo after he's spent all this time reflecting. Maybe, if we get really lucky, his contemplations will lead him to the realization that he is nothing but an obstacle and nuisance who needs to butt out of the process.

I think it's obvious that there is a large number of editors who agree that he should be removed from the process. Unfortunately, it's like herding cats to get a consensus of people to agree what to do about it and how.

Oh come on.

The encyclopedia that purports to be the sum of all human knowledge surely has articles from the political history of human civilization suggesting any number of plausible models to choose from.

There is the example of Stephen Langton and King John, leading to the Magna Carta. That document marked a significant passage in the advance of civilization that many historians count as the advent of the concept known today as Civil Rights.

Then there is the French Revolution. Surely there are some spare knitting needles lying around.

If the herd of cats can't get their act together, there are the earlier models of Becket and other meddlesome priests of the New Testament epoch.

Or one could turn to more subtle 20th Century models, such as those suggested by Gandhi or King.

It's not like these things have no precedent in the annals of human history.

Surely there is an Alice to stand up the Red Queen.

Despite it not being Saturday yet, Risker has already identified as a "new enwiki arbcom member". Strange, I thought the new members were being announced on Saturday?