English wiki Unsourced BLP Drama Pragmatic Review

Sorry it took me so long to reply.

I agree that people have gotten stuck on the policy rather than the spirit. I can't help but think that's part of how broken our dispute resolution process is, though. Because it's so hard to arrive at a consensus (it took barely more than 25% of the volunteers to raise enough stink to block things from moving), the few areas of consensus get mangled into these really narrow and technical interpretations. No one is going to agree on the basic principles.

Seems to me that this reaffirms the general principle that ArbCom should stay out of content issues. But I don't think it invalidates the idea that ArbCom sometimes needs to force a dialog and a compromise on content issues. Just that they have to sometimes recognize when the community is still trying to work it out, and sometimes recognize when the community is failing and needs some structure and support.

This is a situation where the community was still working on it. Not that they could have settled it... but maybe they'd have eventually identified the real issue: not a lack of sources, but an overwhelming proportion of unsourced material.