User talk:Mackensen/Devolution

Funny you should say that

This is a more advanced form of the idea that was gestating in my mind this morning. (What can I say, it was a really boring meeting.) Perhaps the opportunity to overturn/modify user-specific or article-specific sanctions should be included, what do you think? Risker (talk) 18:57, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

• I think it would be up to Arbcom whether it wanted those sorts of remedies within the scope of a review board. To be clear, there are two interconnected ideas floating around in my head: the admin review board, which would sit between arbcom and RFC, and the block review board, which would handle tasks devolved from Arbcom. There's no reason that the two couldn't be merged, but I would think Arbcom would retain the right of final approval over a modification of a ruling that it had made. Mackensen (talk) 19:05, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

• Oh absolutely; I was thinking more the admin-established sanctions, which are either extensions of the general arbcom sanctions like the article I pointed out on Lar's page (sorry, linking is a problem right now), or under this BLP sanction currently being discussed, as well as the little private ones that are happening in the background and may or may not get discussed at WP:AN or WP:ANI. I wouldn't foresee them directly modifying a ruling made by Arbcom. For example, Arbcom would be the only ones to modify the (general) sanction on Israel/Palestine articles, but this interim level would review any additional sanctions imposed on a specific article by an admin. Right now, these types of sanctions aren't being reviewed by anyone as far as I can tell. Risker (talk) 19:20, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Another path

Thank you for linking this. I've very nearly used up my quota of non-article edits for this week, so forgive me if I'm brief.

Once I began to upack the idea of arbcom I realise that what they mostly do is make people grow stones. Reviewing past cases, the majority could have been dealt with by better co-ordination of action by regular editors. In all cases, the actual enforcement gets handed off to someone else (albiet to a steward for deadminning).

I'd prefer a much less paperwork-and-hierachy style solution devolution: One where we can get to the bottom of things in a structured way without having to rely on the committee. The (very rough) idea I'm toying with is to make the commitee clerks only. They enforce civility/brevity/etc on the existing rat's nest of pages (evidence, workshop, etc) but no not inject themselves into the outcomes.

Problems with the concept, yes. I think back to the contrast between Kely Martin RFC 3(?) that was a total bunfight and 3.1 that was treated more like an article. While it came too late, the second one looked a lot like me pseudo-arbcom.

brenneman 02:32, 20 June 2008 (UTC)