User:Sven Manguard/2011 ArbCom Voter Guide

I helped write this year's general questions, and there are several questions in particular that I will be giving a great deal of weight to when I make my assessments. Questions 5 (ArbCom and motions), 6 (Private information), and 8 (Challenges facing the project) are questions that I pushed for, and are the ones I'll be paying the closest attention to. Questions 7 (Division of responsibilities) and 9 (Reflection on 2011 Cases), and possibally 10 (Proposals for change) will factor in to a lesser degree. As to the first four questions, a candidate would have to say something monumentally brilliant or monumentally stupid for me to take anything said there into consideration.

Mind you, I consider everyone running in the ArbCom election to be a politician, and I have a strong, inherent distrust for politicians, so I'll be paying close attention to what the candidates have said and done in a number of critical discussions and long term disputes. I've already flagged several discussions. I'll also be looking at other users' guides to see which discussions they've decided are important, and I might decide to throw some of those onto my list as well.

I factor personal interactions I've had with the candidates, regardless of the forum, into this guide. If I don't explicitly mention otherwise all of my interactions with that candidate, or at least all interactions non-trivial enough to factor into the guide, have been on Wikipedia and are therefore public record. Please note that I have never knowingly met another Wikipedian in real life.

Finally, a note on sitting members. I am currently involved (but not a named party) in the Betacommand 3 case. While I would have liked to, and indeed initially planned to, not comment on active committee members until the case was over, it dosen't look like that is feasible. I really hope that all of the Arbs who happen upon this guide are ethical enough to keep what I say here, and the proceedings of that case, completely separate.

The following opinions are mine alone. I encourage you to read multiple guides, including the guides of editors they are unfamiliar with, in order to get a broad prospective of opinions on individual candidates. Even more importantly, I encourage you to do your own research. The guide writers are not lying scoundrels out to deceive the voters, but we do have our own strongly held beliefs and opinions, and you might see situations differently than we do.  S ven M anguard  Wha?

Summary
What's it mean? I don't do tactical voting, what you see is exactly what I believe. If I support a candidate, I believe that the candidate would be good for the committee. I have no problem supporting more people than there are open seats. If I oppose a candidate, it means that I don't think that the candidate should be on the committee. I have no problem with the committee starting below capacity, so I won't pull punches for that reason.

Why then Strong Support and Strong Oppose? There are a few users who might run that I believe are either so well qualified as to be needed on the committee, or are so unqualified that having a position on ArbCom would be dangerous. In short, if I use either of these ratings, it means that I think that it will be noticeably bad for the project as a whole for a Strong Support to not get a seat, or for a Strong Oppose to be given a seat. While there are prospective candidates that I've already decided deserve one of these two ratings, I don't see either of the ratings appearing in the guide more than once or twice.

Guide
I've decided to blank this. If you want to read it, it's in the edit history.

Credit for the idea goes to Elonka.

Guide on guides
Same as above, I've decided to blank this. It's still in the edit history though.