Guild Wars Wiki:Elections/2007-06 bureaucrat election/Dirigible

Dirigible is one of the founding members of this official wiki and one of the most profound contributors, not only in volume (which is critical for a new wiki) but in the quality of contributions and his desire to get core issues addressed and solid policies formulated.

To summarize, Dirigible is da man. :)

Candidate statement[edit]

Besides lowering taxes, world peace and free drinks, there's not much else that I can, should or will promise here. Fondness for the project, honesty, good judgement and fairness are the main values that a bureaucrat should have. Whether I get passing grades on those qualities or not is up to the community to decide. What I'll discuss here is how I see the bureaucrat position here on the Guild Wars Wiki from a normal editor's perspective, and is what I'll be expecting from bureaucrats here on the wiki, regardless of whether I'm myself in that role or not.

Thanks to the efforts of the community during the writing of the adminship policy, bureaucrats have a relatively limited role on the wiki today. They have very few tasks, and just like with sysops, those tasks are explicitly oriented toward maintaining the wiki's internal mechanisms functioning well and nothing more than that, leaving the community itself in charge of guiding the wiki via consensus.

The policy currently delineates two tasks for bureaucrats: de/sysopping editors and dealing with user disputes through the ArbComm. For both of them I think that the main weight of the decision-making should fall squarely on the community's shoulders, who should dictate through policies and discussion what happens on the wiki.

- In the sysopping process bureaucrats should be merely the weatherman who checks the thermometer to see if its going to be hot or cold (while keeping an eye out for that sneaky bikini salesman next door, just in case he decides to light a big fire to make the thermometer's reading go nuts). The community is going to decide for itself who it wants to sysop or not, bureaucrats will merely make sure that happens. As others have eloquently argued before, sysop tools shouldn't be a big deal; thus generally in RfAs where community consensus seems genuinely on the fence about what should be done, I think the result should be to give the sysop tools to the user in question. The Requests for adminship draft has been posted, and everyone should definitely take a look at it to make sure that it reflects our expectations as a community on this matter.

- As far as user disputes go, I'm assuming we'll eventually have at least some rough guideline of how the ArbComm process should work, so both users and bureaucrats have an idea what to expect when the ArbComm is called. Until such guidelines have been set up, my personal stance toward user disputes is that they should be escalated up to the ArbComm as rarely as possible (maybe even never... one can only hope!). Consensus through discussion should in all cases be how the community makes sure these disputes get resolved swiftly and don't get out of hand (Requests for comment is one of several tools that can help with that).

If the matter does reach the ArbComm, I believe that we should at the very least keep the discussion between the bureaucrats as transparent as possible, and allow community feedback throughout the process. The ArbComm has only been called once so far, and in that case the communication between the two bureaucrats happened off-wiki. Even though I'll grant that the issue was minor and the bureaucrats' decision was merely a formality, I still don't think that's the right way to deal with this, and (as a user) I'll be pushing for this not to become standard procedure.

That's about all, I think.

Cheers. --Dirigible 20:39, 11 June 2007 (UTC)