User:NuclearWarfare/ACE2013

Hello, I'm. Since 2010, I have written something for the Arbitration Committee elections. In 2010 and 2011, while I was an Arbitration Committee clerk, I wrote an election guide. In 2012, I threw my hat in the ring and was very grateful to the community (at the beginning anyway) for electing me to a two-year position. Unfortunately, I was not able to serve until the end of my term and had to resign about nine months in. This year, I am again writing an election guide.

Having served on the Committee has entirely changed my perspective on who would be good for the role and who wouldn't be. I will be voting to support several candidates who I am sure are completely wrong in how they approach both particular issues and several broad topics. The criteria I will be using can be ascertained from the general thoughts section below, though what I wrote in User:NuclearWarfare/ACE2011 still applies in full.

General thoughts
A number of Arbitrators in the past have written great pieces about what you should do before you decide to run for ArbCom. A few that stand out to me are User:Risker/FAQ for Arbcom Candidates, User:Risker/Thoughts for Arbitration Committee Candidates, and User:AGK/ACE2012. Please read those above pages. Even if you are not planning on running, they provide an invaluable sliver of something that can truly only be understood by going through the process.

I want to expand on just a couple of things in this brief introductory statement that are covered in the links above.



This will happen. If you intend to remain pseudonymous, you are fooling yourself. If you think this will not have real world consequences, you are likely also mistaken.


 * Will you be outed? Yes.
 * Will you be contacted by email by people off-mailing list? Yes.
 * Will you be contacted through other venues? Likely.
 * Will you be sued or threatened to be sued in a court of law? It has happened before.
 * Will the fact that your real life identity is not masked make it easier for this to happen? Yes.
 * Will the Wikimedia Foundation provide you with a lawyer if you are sued? Most likely. The ones that they contract out to apparently have a quite solid reputation.



This is entirely true. However, the time you put into this position is highly variable. I hope it is not some great surprise that some Arbitrators do less work than others. Some Arbitrators do substantially more work and others do substantially less. As an example of the former, Ban Appeals work was handled by less than half the Arbitrators, and one Arbitrator in particular easily handled a solid half of the appeals who also pulled more than his fair share with the rest of ArbCom work.

ArbCom work is surprisingly diverse in nature. There is of course the one that everyone thinks of first—case management&mdash;but that is harder to get involved with than one would imagine. Two Arbitrators each draft one case, and the rotation is such that it would be surprising if you drafted more than five cases in a two-year term. But there is plenty of other work. Case amendment, clarification, and opening requests take a significant amount of time to read and corral everyone else into. Ban Appeals is another one. Checkuser and Oversight auditing used to be one, but now that has almost no work associated with it. What does have a significant amount of work associated with it is organizing the annual or biannual checkuser/oversight/auditor appointment process as well generally liaising with both the broader functionaries’ team as well as the Wikimedia Foundation. There’s also the miscellaneous stuff, like discretionary sanctions updating or just replying to the huge number of people that email the mailing list every week. There is plenty more that I am either not addressing now or have simply forgotten, but I’m not about to dig into my email archives to relive those fine memories now. There are just about exactly 1,000 email threads in my inbox with the "arbcom-l" tag from the first nine months of 2013. That’s threads, not individual emails, and it is only one of ten mailing lists Arbitrators are on (besides arbcom-l, there are the rarely-used arbcom-en-b and arbcom-en-c; the mostly silent arbcom-audit-en; arbcom-en-appeals; clerks-l; functionaries-en; oversight-l; otrs-en-l; and the global checkuser-l).

But as I said, you don't have to be involved with everything always. However, just as an example, there was one Arbitrator who was heavily involved with Ban Appeals work for a solid half-year before realizing that they needed to take a break from it all. And so they did. That's pretty normal—it’s entirely straightforward to say that you need to stop doing so much work for ArbCom. And that’s normal and healthy. However. It does tend to screw everyone else over a little. Working patterns on the Committee are rather viscous most of the time. Sure, they can change, but in general there are some Arbitrators who focus on the day-to-day matters of the Committee, and others whose focus is broader. Some in both categories of Arbitrators work more than others do. Once Committee members take that break (and again, it is fine if they do), backlogs happen—either with the day-to-day or even with cases like Tea Party movement. I am not trying to blame anyone for the latter, but if no one is willing to step up to look into a matter more deeply once it is clear that the proposed solution isn’t satisfactory, it won’t be done.





No one said this last one, but it is important to take into consideration if you are elected. You will have had personal interactions with plenty of the parties who appear before the Committee. In some of these cases, these interactions will cause you to need to recuse. Especially if you find yourself as one of the few Arbitrators with a particular point of view and you feel like everyone else might be biased, consider that the problem might be yourself. On the other hand, it might also be the case that you are correct and that the rest of the Committee is making an incredibly dumb decision.

It may seem that I say that last sentence facetiously, but I truly believe it to be the case. I have certainly been on the losing side many times. In some, I eventually realized that I was too involved to see the bigger picture, and ought to have recused. In others, I am still convinced that the Committee got it wrong. If you end up on the Committee, it is incumbent upon you to find a way to express your disagreement while still being able to uphold the Committee's overall decision. It becomes easiest to do this if everyone's votes are in the public record. Handle as little as possible off-wiki and get prior consent for failed off-wiki motions to be publicly posted. This forces everyone to give at least a bare on-wiki explanation for their actions, and this is invaluable in providing accountability.



This does not mean you are on "GovCom". I tend to think that the conception of Arbitrators trying to overstep their remit and use their position to govern The Community™ is not an accurate depiction. Certainly I did not observe that among anyone in the 2013 Committee. We were of course accused of doing so, and I imagine that I personally was so accused as well.

However, there are cases where an Arbitrator suggested that the Committee avoid taking a particular action and look for all possible avenues to avoid it in order to appear politically neutral and for ArbCom to retain institutional credibility. ArbCom only loses institutional credibility when Arbitrators fail to take action that they otherwise would because of fear of political payback. Vote as if you only want to serve on the Committee for one term, and then if you want to run again in two years, that's on you. The Committee is not a place you go to earn power; it is where you go to do what you feel is best for resolving issues the English Wikipedia community has. If you aren't willing to do that first and foremost you shouldn't be on the Committee.



This final quoted sentence has been in both my 2010 and 2011 election guides. When you're on the Committee, this is what you should look to as your ultimate goal. Don't have any sympathy for the cranks, no matter if they have ten edits or ten thousand. A civil POV pusher is far worse than an uncivil combative editor. If an editor is not willing to follow this guideline above all else, sanction them. You do no favors to anyone else by keeping them around.

Well, that’s what I have for now. I hope you can take something from it. My planned votes will be below, along with a brief explanation of my reasoning. They likely will not be as detailed as they were in years past. I don't know how helpful they will be for you all, but I thought I would put them out there in case any of you could take something from it.