User:Joe Roe/Reasons not to run for ArbCom

I was on the Arbitration Committee in 2019–2020. I'm writing this reflection because the experience wasn't what I expected it to be from observing the committee from the outside and I think others might benefit from that warning. I'm writing it now, four years after my term, because enough time has passed that I'm sure that my reasons for not wanting to rejoin are genuine and not just fatigue from my first term. Really it's less a reflection from a former arbitrator and more a reflection from someone who has thought about running practically every year since and decided not to bother.

Shortly after leaving the committee I wrote a draft of something that was more like your standard guide for new arbs (since I was the only new arb that time around), but now I can't remember why I thought any of it was important. If you're looking for something like that read the much better guides by much better arbs like Worm That Turned, Guerillero or Barkeep49.

I'll spare you a comprehensive list of all the potential downsides of being arbitrator. I think it's well known by now that joining the committee will destroy your inbox (seriously, make a specific address for it), temporarily make you public enemy number one to the very people who just elected you, and is generally hard work for little reward. Those are just things you have to deal with. Instead what I've tried to list here are things that seem like plausible reasons to run for ArbCom, but which I think are misplaced.

You want to do something important
Provocative heading, sorry. I don't mean that ArbCom doesn't do important work. I mean that it doesn't only do important work – as you might be led to believe from its selectivity and apparent prestige. The important work is resolving cases that will improve the functioning of our community, which you will do maybe 10% of the time. The other 90% is totally routine and inconsequential: participating in internal discussions, processing block appeals, working out the technicalities of remedies and motions or fixing mistakes from previous committees.

The real bummer here is less the quantity of that routine work (though that is substantial) and more its quality. Probably you, like most Wikipedians, don't mind rolling up your sleeves and cutting down a backlog every now and again. But normally you get to choose which mundane tasks you apply yourself to. On ArbCom, you don't get to choose. If you're going to pull your weight (please don't be the quiet arb), you'll have to decide whether User:100Socks will get his fourteenth chance at an unblock, or if vegetables, broadly construed, includes tomatoes. It's just the price of admission.

If you want to maximise the impact you have in your Wikipedia activity, you can do better than ArbCom. There are other areas of the project where you can do important work without a serving of drudgery on the side – especially considering that arb work tends to be time-consuming in itself.

You want to resolve disputes
By the time I left the committee I was convinced that the most influential people in conduct disputes the admins who frequented WP:ANI and WP:AE – not ArbCom. The reason for this is quite simple: by the time disputes reach ArbCom, it's already intractable. This is not a secret—the arbitration process is explicitly for "unresolvable issues"—but the significance is easy to overlook. Although the conceit is that ArbCom "solves" or "breaks" these deadlocked disputes, in reality what it does it assign blame, decide who gets banned from what, and maybe designate a new contentious topic. That is not unimportant work, but it's also not dispute resolution. In contrast, admins at ANI and AE can intervene to diffuse conflicts before anyone gets banned. And they're usually understaffed; go join them!

A significant exception here is disputes involving nonpublic information, such as cases of off-wiki harassment, because they go to ArbCom first (and last). Wanting to help with these challenging cases is a good reason to be an arbitrator.

You don't know what a CIDR range is
It may well have changed since—I hope so—but I cannot emphasise enough how much of the workload during my term revolved around CheckUser. There were appeals of CheckUser blocks, audits of CheckUser activity, appointments of new CheckUsers, requests to revoke the permission from existing CheckUsers, discussions of CheckUser policy... it was a truly overwhelming introduction to an area of the project I previously had zero interest in. Usually there's an informal division of labour between 'CU-arbs' and the others when it comes to the heavy lifting on these things, but if you don't feel like you can learn at least the basics of how the tool works, you should seriously consider whether you'll be able to contribute effectively to the committee.

You want to do something else
When I was on the committee, arb work took up all the time and energy I had for Wikipedia. Everything else I wanted to achieve on the project had to be put on hold for two years and that meant when I was finished I had a lot of catching up to do and some fires to put out. Your mileage will probably vary on this, based on how much time you have for Wikipedia in the first place, but as a rule of thumb I'd say that if you already edit on top of of a full-time responsibility, don't count on having anything left after you've caught up on the day's arb business.

Reasons to run for ArbCom
I'm obviously not the best person to articulate good reasons to join ArbCom, because the whole conceit of this list is that I've given up on it, but I don't want to leave you with the impression that it's all bad. So here are the things that should tempt you and might (but probably won't) tempt me back:


 * Camaraderie – I've heard that this varies a lot from iteration to iteration, but I really enjoyed being in daily contact with the other arbs during my term and the genuine sense that, even though we disagreed, we should put on a united front and back each other up. It was without a doubt the most social and collaborative experience I've had on Wikipedia.
 * You want to make sure nonpublic information is being handled properly – as I've alluded to above, the most impactful and unique responsibilities that remain to the committee are those surrounding nonpublic information. This includes inter-editor disputes but also the regulation and oversight of the CheckUser, Oversight, and UPE-enforcement teams. If you want to make sure that these are being handled properly, and especially if you already have experience in one of those areas, running for ArbCom is a good idea.
 * Someone asks you to – truth be told, this is why I ran. Somebody's got to do it, and if you get the tap on the shoulder from somebody you respect, just see it as a service to the community. The feeling of giving something back is why, despite the somewhat negative tone of this list, I don't actually regret my term.