To address the comments made. The mediation committee does not have formal means of enforcement. This is something maybe we should look at creating. What is needed is a group of people who actively research the topic and come to a tentative and enforceable conclusion. The mediation committee is described as the counterpart to ArbCom but seems to be without teeth.
While my experience is mainly with the English Wikipedia the same issues seem to arise in other languages. During the debate over including images of the Rorschach ink blots on Wikipedia the same debate was going on in many other languages. What we have is the occasional small group that unreasonably pushes a one sided promotional point of view to the detriment of the encyclopedia. They often edit on only a single subject area and take up a great deal of resources of editors who are trying to write an encyclopedia. One can go to a number of different places and get a couple of users to comment but none of these comments are ever binding and in a number of debates I have been involved in have been dismissed as uninformed. What is needed is a "finding of facts" not related to user behaviour but content after a review of the literature. These interpretations with discussion would than be implemented until which time the literature on the subject matter changes. This would allow people to resume productive editing rather than going around in circles for sometimes years generating millions of bits of text and spending hundreds of hours. -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
