Office of Advocate missing

Fragment of a discussion from Talk:May 2011 Update

Well, I can largely go with that. Minor res... well, make that "substantial reservations...

Practically every article is a specialist article. (Same for threads. eg in physics forum I have contributed to threads in the biology sub-forum, as well as threads in other sub-forums, and never the twain did meet (weeeellll... haaardly ever...)). One of the strengths of WP is that specialists can write semi-literate articles that can be tidied up by literate non-specialists in the relevant disciplines, and be corrected and updated by the semi-literates in turn. (Not all specialists are semi-literate of course; it would be an ambitious English major who would fiddle with anything written by say, Medawar or the best of Dawkins! In other disciplines, I might mention say, Tyndall, Wells, Julian Huxley, Faraday... never mind -- let's just say that knowledgeable people can be good writers but some of them are not, but can be helped out in the WP environment.)
The mere fact that it can take specialists for meta-tasks like policing, means that they are likely not to be specialists in the content of the primary material being policed. This makes it very important that access to ombudsmen (specialists of course, if possible) should be at once easy, reasonable and obvious.
Bottom line is that "reasonability" is most important, far more so than consistency and perceptions of fairness. The latter can be patched up in due course if people are reasonable; the converse is less often true.

Well anyway, I reckon we are largely on the same wavelength.

JonRichfield07:44, 7 May 2011