Communal enabling of quality

Randomran said it for me - "there's a real systemic problem with how disputes are settled... Ortega suggests that there is a problem with consensus-building falling off, and more people pushing their personal opinion. I suspect that consensus building is falling off simply because of scale, if nothing else. It's easy for 2 or 3 people to agree about how to change a couple of sentences on an article. But it's hard for 50 or so people to come together and figure out the best way to cover an entire topic area. And yes, those two person debates escalate into WikiProject discussions or RFCs or policy discussions, which attract entire cartels of opinion pushers. And sadly, many of those opinion pushers are not interested in consensus building. They've actually realized that they can accomplish more by filibustering..."

Woodwalker also - "This is imho one of the biggest problems our task group has to find solutions for... 1) How can we ensure quality users get more respect and/or influence in communities (and in that way prolong their life time)? 2) How can we get quality users at local projects out of their isolation?"

I'd add a third aspect: big problems often need outside help -- and on enwiki we have problems so difficult, so extended in some areas, that by the time you exclude involved users, people who will be accused of bias, users unwilling to endure attacks, and only users with very high experience and capability, there's nobody (including its Arbcom) able, capable and willing to address these.

As our mandate is to produce a few recommendations, we need to think hard, what one change here is most likely to succeed and make the biggest incremental difference. I think having a way to formally recognize "trusted content editors" (noted before) is actually the one biggest change that could help. I post below, my thoughts why.