User:Brews ohare/Functional talk pages

In the essays below, a serious effort has been made to outline some changes that would relieve Administrators from some of their obnoxious duties and allow them time to do really useful work in renovating WP arbitration and disciplinary proceedings.

A few essays resulting from experience on WP:

• On drafting clear sanctions
• Filtering ArbCom cases
• Handling minority views
• What administrators should do

This page is a forum to discuss these and alternative proposals to improve Talk page dynamics and to avoid an atmosphere of belligerence and intolerance of opposing views.

Experience and lessons from the Climate change debate

Here is a quote:

Articles related to climate change have been one of Wikipedia's problem areas for a number of years now. Most of the disruption boils down to often heated or uncivil disagreement over the proper application of WP:WEIGHT and WP:SCIRS, though sockpuppetry and single-purpose accounts out of touch with wider Wikipedia norms play their roles. Near the end of last year, the Copenhagen Summit on climate change and the Climatic Research Unit email controversy contributed to a surge in interest in this family of articles; that furor has largely died down now. Whether the long term or the short term patterns have been more problematic is an open question, but a few days into the new year the community established Wikipedia:General sanctions/Climate change probation, giving uninvolved administrators wide leeway when acting to quell disruption in this topic area, and establishing a Requests for enforcement board for discussing the same.

I am hesitant about administrators' attempts to "quell disruption" in a topic area. They do have roles to catalyze mindful discussion by insistence upon WP:Civil, by policing unreasonable activities like sockpuppetry, and by insisting upon proper respect for sources, although they are not equipped to identify what sources are reliable in any detail. I hope that they would agree that if responsible discussion is interminable, that is perfectly fine, and does not constitute disruption.

If administrators can preserve an environment where responsible discussion can take place, without intruding upon points of view or usurping participating editors' right to discuss whatever themes the participants have decided are allowable, that is all they should try to do, and they can be proud of that accomplishment. Brews ohare (talk) 17:09, 3 September 2010 (UTC)