 | An essay in progress on the limits of Wikipedia's policies |
Wikipedia was built (and functions despite all of its faults), on the paradigm of collaborative creation of a reference source. Wikipedia policies have generally been built with that in mind: dispute resolution, conduct policies, consensus, all of these things are how we come up with content - and we have applied them to varying success to every problem we've faced - and when that failed we've applied the very direct problem solving of the internet: WHEELs and k-lines.
On rare occasion Wikipedia makes traction with real life: harassment, stalking, BLP issues, credential crisis, and now privacy problems. These are the domains where we see Wikipedia's policies and cultures show the most strain: and why should we be surprised? Where do methods of collaborative editing and methods for protecting yourself with a stalker meet? Where does an open threaded discussion system find common ground with privacy concerns?
The Arbitration system was designed for the encyclopedia writing, not for policing Checkusers and Oversighters, yet that is the task has been thrust upon them - who are we to take them to task for trying a different method? The problem with CheckUser and Oversight is that they exist at the very border between Wikipedia's internal concerns and the great big Ugly World out there - a world where Wikipedia has become both reporter and participant.
This is not a time for simplistic dogma - it is a time for solutions - this proposal isn't perfect by any means - but we need to accept that there are problems grave enough, and different enough, that we need to simply start trying things until we find something that works.