Wikipedia:Ombudsmen

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This proposal has failed to attain consensus within the Wikipedia community. A failed proposal is one for which a consensus to accept is not present after a reasonable amount of time, and seems unlikely to form, regardless of continuing discussion.

The cherished goal of NPOV for Wikipedia often seems to be getting farther and farther away from realization. One of the most intractable problems is that POV warfare is carried on in a highly organized basis, not only in the editing, but often in administrative functions as well. It takes the form of what have been described variously as WikiCliques or POV posses, which generally have one or more Designated Administrators, administrators who carefully avoid direct participation in specific conflicts, but will intervene with administrative powers on the side of their respective teammates. An example of such behavior is what might be called the Protection Racket, where admins watch the Requests for Protection page in order to protect the versions desired by their buddies, and POV warriors time protection requests so as to intersect periods when their Designated Admins are on patrol.

At present, the remedies are inadequate. Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship seems very unwieldy and is seldom used. The proposed remedy is that there be a higher echelon of administrators, to be called ombudsmen, who would be held to a far higher standard of propriety and neutrality than present administrators. In contrast to the present status of administrators, a member who becomes an ombudsman could lose that status at the slightest hint of partisanship in any dispute where ombudsman powers are invoked, if a complaint is found to be justified by an elected Ombudsmen Committee. Ombudsman powers should consist of:

1. The authority to discipline admins by imposing temporary bans on their use of admin powers, just as admins may temporarily ban ordinary editors from editing. This authority would be used when admins are found to be using their authority to further the POV-pushing of their allies.

2. The authority to temporarily intervene into POV disputes by setting ground-rules for conflict resolution in specific articles, in order to take some of the load off of the mediation and arbitration committees, and speed conflict resolution. In such cases, where an ombudsman assumes responsibility for a highly contested article, he or she could overrule other admins on matters such as protection, if the ombudsman determines that said admins were using their powers in a partisan way.