User:NoSeptember/arbcom decisions

<The NoSeptember Admin Project

This page is intended to review the principles behind ArbCom decisions.

The particular focus is on admin desysoppings. Are decisions to be based on the evidence of the present case, or on the larger issues of a pattern of conduct and of the long term impact on the project?

Some statements from Arbitrators on the subject:

Dmcdevit: Hm? Worthy of desysopping? I'd say maybe; it doesn't realy matter how disruptive this one event was, but whther, based on the evidence, it was part of a pattern of poor judgment, or simply a forgivable mistake. You question misses the point, though. Here it is: Worthy of an arbitration case? Absolutely: that's the only way we can answer that pattern vs. mistake question.    

Matthew Brown (Morven): ...A number of times, the arbitration committee has, indeed, let people off with a warning because they are productive editors that we like. A number of times, this has come back to bite us, because our failure to act has let the situation only escalate.... ...Desysopping MONGO because of my gut feeling that more trouble will result breaks from the existing way of things, in that we have historically waited for someone to totally burn out and break things before desysopping. On the other hand, we've all seen the chaos that can result from that....  ...We have sometimes been poor at 'showing our working' - there is sometimes (often?) a gap between the stated findings and the remedies.... This is not, often, because we are off conspiring in some back room deciding what to do, but simply because as Gregory says we are reaching our conclusions about what should be done by reading directly from the evidence, and possibly further research on our own, not from only reading the findings. We are also not some mechanical process of input the policy violations here, apply some math, out come the remedies there. In this, I feel, we are attempting to follow Jimbo's way of running things pre-Arbcom - that the final arbiter of things should not be a mechanical application of rules but a human process of evaluating the thing as a whole and trying to do the best thing for the project. We are always evaluating things in the light of someone's overall contribution and behaviour, not just the behaviour brought to light in a specific case. Some admins seem to want Arbcom decisions to be purely a mechanical application of rules, purely based on the evidence set forth, and with a very laid down set of penalties for various violations of the rules. I do not, personally, agree with that.  

Charles Matthews: 

Fred Bauder:   

From Jimbo:

Jimbo Wales: