User:Mz7/ACE2023

For this election, there are 10 candidates running for 8 vacant seats. All of them may be filled for either a two-year term or a one-year term, depending on the candidate's level of support, as well as where they finish with respect to other candidates.

What does the Arbitration Committee do?
The Arbitration Committee ("ArbCom") has five distinct responsibilities that are defined in Wikipedia policy at Arbitration/Policy. They are:
 * 1) To act as a final binding decision-maker primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve.
 * This one is perhaps the most visible activity to the broader community, but it is important to remember that it is just one of the many responsibilities that we have assigned the Arbitration Committee. Members of the community can request that the Arbitration Committee intervene in certain disputes at subpages of Arbitration/Requests. You can see an archive of past proceedings at Arbitration/Index. In the early days of Wikipedia, the Arbitration Committee frequently intervened in user conduct disputes, but as Wikipedia has matured, arbitration cases have become rarer. In 2006, for example, ArbCom accepted 116 cases, whereas so far in 2023, it has heard only 6 cases (including one that is ongoing as of when I am writing this). Today, the Arbitration Committee will generally only agree to intervene in the most intractable disputes (often concerning controversial topic areas) or in disputes concerning administrator conduct (see #3 below).
 * 1) To hear appeals from blocked, banned, or otherwise restricted users.
 * In theory, the Arbitration Committee has broad discretion under policy to hear appeals from any "blocked, banned, or otherwise restricted" user, but in practice, the Committee itself has stated that it will, for the time being, take appeals (i) from editors who are subject to an OversightBlock or a Checkuserblock; (ii) from editors who are blocked for reasons that are unsuitable for public discussion; and (iii) from editors blocked or banned by Arbitration and Arbitration Enforcement decisions. See Arbitration Committee/Procedures. ArbCom will generally decline to consider appeals that don't fall under these categories because we have other processes that more transparently handle such appeals, such as the unblock template and WP:UTRS. I suspect that much of the day-to-day, behind-the-scenes work of the Arbitration Committee is responding to these kinds of appeals. ArbCom receives and disposes of most appeals via email, so the broader community often has no visibility into this work, except occasionally when the Committee announces a successful appeal on its noticeboard. Occasionally, ArbCom will solicit community feedback on specific appeals (see here for a recent example), but this is relatively rare., who served on the Committee 2020–2022 (and is running again this year) has stated that, out of the appeals that ArbCom receives, the overwhelming majority (95%+) are checkuser blocks. While the workload isn't particularly high (no more than 20-ish in a given month), it is quite dreary and perhaps requires a slightly different skillset compared to what one could assume based on the Committee's on-wiki actions. Maxim also recommends because of this that it is useful to have an experienced and technically confident checkuser (and then maybe a second one) on the Committee.
 * 1) To handle requests (other than self-requests) for removal of administrative tools.
 * If a Wikipedia administrator is being problematic, a key responsibility of the Arbitration Committee is reviewing whether that administrator should continue to be an administrator. With a few limited exceptions, the Arbitration Committee is the only entity on the English Wikipedia that is capable of removing the adminship of Wikipedia administrators (in wiki-jargon, this is called "desysopping"). This does not mean that all disputes involving administrator conduct must be brought immediately before the Arbitration Committee—see arbitrator 's remarks here (in the context of this declined arbitration request)—but it does explain why many arbitrators have stated they have a lower bar for accepting arbitration requests concerning administrator conduct (in other kinds of cases, arbitrators typically set a high bar for accepting arbitration requests, typically requiring that all other avenues of dispute resolution have been exhausted first).
 * 1) To resolve matters unsuitable for public discussion for privacy, legal, or similar reasons.
 * This is the portion of the Arbitration Committee's work that is almost entirely invisible to the broader community on-wiki, yet as time has gone on, it has become increasingly important. Arbitrators in the past have described ArbCom's work as an "iceberg"—, who was an arbitrator 2011–2014 and again 2020–2021, has written that as the community overall has gotten better at handling disputes before they reach arbitration [...] these "unseen tasks" account for more of the Committee's business. In a thread I started in 2016 commenting on the declining on-wiki caseload, arbitrator  (who served 2016–2019 and again 2022–2023) wrote that Another consequence of the dropping-case-volume trend is that the relative importance of the behind-the-scenes parts of the job increases, even if the quantity doesn't change that much. Obviously, it's harder for the community to judge who will be (or was) effective in the behind-the-scenes roles, and arguably harder to recruit arb candidates to do a job they haven't been able to see. When I asked whether she thought ArbCom generally does a good job handling the behind-the-scenes work, she wrote: I think we're reasonably good at handling the "routine" behind-the-scenes stuff, though many of the issues brought to us are unfortunately not really things we can help much with. As a rough guess, around a quarter to a third of arbcom-l threads that originate from people who are not arbs, functionaries, or trolls are about harassment/outing issues, often involving things happening on other sites. (We also get a lot of appeals of CU blocks, and lost souls who ought to have sent their issue to OTRS.) That being said, the more unusual the circumstance, the more ineffective we'll probably be - we're really muddling through on some of that harassment stuff.  That was in 2016, and naturally, a lot has happened since then. In particular, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has become increasingly involved in responding to these kinds of private-evidence-related issues, and they have established a whole process for determining when to act—see foundation:Policy:Office actions. Notably, one particular WMF office action placed the WMF and the English Wikipedia community in conflict with each other in 2019, and one consequence of that was a lengthy "Anti-harassment RfC" in 2020, in which the Arbitration Committee presented the community with a number of questions about how ArbCom should respond to harassment. I have also heard that the Arbitration Committee and a point of contact from the WMF now have a regularly scheduled call with each other.
 * 1) To approve and remove access to (i) CheckUser and Oversight tools and (ii) mailing lists maintained by the Arbitration Committee.
 * This is probably the portion of the Arbitration Committee's work that is the most procedural and the least controversial. While ArbCom has the final decision over whether to grant CheckUser and Oversight permissions, it will typically solicit feedback on candidates from the community before proceeding with an appointment. See Arbitration Committee/CheckUser and Oversight/2023 CUOS appointments for the most recent feedback solicitation.

Specific thoughts
The candidates are listed here in alphabetical order.

This page in a nutshell

 * Support


 * 1) Aoidh
 * 2) Cabayi
 * 3) Firefly
 * 4) HJ Mitchell
 * 5) Maxim
 * 6) ToBeFree
 * 7) Wugapodes
 * 8) Z1720


 * Neutral


 * 1) Sdrqaz


 * Oppose


 * 1) Robert McClenon