User:Theleekycauldron/Essays/More opinionated arbs 2023

Hi! This is really only half a voter guide for WP:ACE2023, if that's why you're reading this. It's probably not the best decision to base all of your votes on what I'll say here, in case such a thought crossed your mind. This page is also an essay on a quality that I think many arbs lack, to the detriment of trust in ArbCom and the quality of ArbCom decisions. That quality is, to put it bluntly, gumption. Experience making tough and controversial decisions and being transparent as to why they were made. With that in mind, I asked a question to every candidate who would be a new face on ArbCom; this page goes through why I asked the question and my thoughts on the answers of each candidate.

Oh, one last thing, actually: I applaud everyone who chose to stand this cycle. I hold every candidate, as individuals, in high regard. Thank you for offering your service, all :)

The question and its philosophy

 * 1) Thank you for standing :) ArbCom makes a lot of tough decisions in user conduct cases, often with potential for community blowback. What's the toughest (or, one of the toughest) decisions you've made with the admin tools? Preferably a situation related to user-conduct, although anything'll do. Talk about the way you approached the situation, the weighed factors, how you came to a decision, any fallout that came as a result, and if you would have done anything differently. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 00:12, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

The reason I asked that is because, well, I don't think we have enough ArbCom candidates who are transparent about their thoughts and have an established record in approaching user-conduct cases. ArbCom spends a lot of time dealing with complex and high-profile cases where there is significant potential for community blowback, and yet we don't elect admins with experience in complex and high-profile cases where there is significant potential for community blowback; those admins are too "opinionated" and "controversial" to be on ArbCom, the conventional wisdom goes. As a result, we elect arbitrators who play their cards close to the vest, not knowing how they'll approach a user-conduct case until they're actually on the Committee. If you care about having an ArbCom that maintains overall institutional legitimacy by doing the right thing even when it loses votes, you should want arbitrators who are willing to disagree with the community where it counts because they have a strong, pre-existing philosophy towards the kind of cases ArbCom deals with, and are willing to be transparent about that difference.

Aoidh
I think that this is okay, if a little lacking. Aoidh pretty freely admits to not having the experience I'm looking for, but I'm not going to disqualify a candidate because they don't work in user-conduct. (I do think that not every candidate should be a policy admin, but a content-review admin such as DYK is fine for me.) I'll also applaud their ability to keep a cool head under pressure, per the discussion they linked to in that thread, and the willingness to let other admins take the lead. Aoidh is a fine admin, and they would make a fine arbitrator, but they're not the kind of candidate that I think ArbCom is running a deficiency of. They're the kind of arbitrator ArbCom already has.

firefly
This is also okay, but not exactly what I'm looking for. The community almost always has high confidence in decisions made by the CU/SPI team, because they don't have the evidence (and, often, experience) necessary to question it. SPI cases also tend to lack the policy-ethical complexity that other kinds of user-conduct cases have: the gray area is usually a question of innocence, not of severity. So I'm not sure that firefly is demonstrating experience with making potentially controversial decisions with advanced permissions, but I'm glad that they've shared some kind of thought process on how they make decisions in complex cases, and speak to some experience in that.

HJ Mitchell
HJ Mitchell does a pretty good job with this answer (and not just because he flatters me!). They pointed to experience in AE, a venue that is maybe one of the toughest places for an admin to make their bones and involves making decisions with high potential for community controversy. I don't think that enacting consensus for a siteban is exactly the same as imposing one unilaterally, but HJ sells the case short: it was an experienced user with a not-insignificant rap sheet, and the it wasn't clear-cut at a glance that a siteban was the necessary response. HJ brings the experience and temperament I definitely think ArbCom could use more of – they're not scared of the block button, but they don't leap to it either, and they're always happy to go into the specifics.

Sdrqaz
All right, credit where credit is due, there's an attempt here. Jay Sanvictores had amassed all of 19 edits at the time of the block, so this might've been "tough" in that it was a head-scratcher for Sdrqaz (and more power, that's good), but it wasn't tough in the sense that the community was going to complain mightily about it. The philosophy Sdrqaz lays out here is clear: slow to block, work with contributors to try and pull them in-bounds. I'll give points for transparency, although I don't know that such a philosophy is great for ArbCom, the place where everyone has dug in their heels so far in that they can't breathe.

ToBeFree
I find this answer disappointing verging on disingenuous, with all due respect to an admin who's made over 15,000 blocks in their tenure. Most of those blocks are AIV-cleaning, but some of them are against experienced users where there really was potential for significant community disagreement. They have the experience I'm looking for, and the fact that they're not willing to be transparent about how they make the decisions they do is not the answer I'm looking for. Whenever there's a tough decision to be made, it should be the result of a consensus makes me think that should they be elected, they will avoid making or pushing for decisions that might earn them criticism, which is something ArbCom already does far too often at the expense of actually being right. ArbCom is supposed to gain social capital by making the clearly right decisions and then spend that social capital to make the tough ones, not gain social capital by shying away from the decisions that are made scary by the social politics.

Z1720
This is pretty decent! I'm a fan of the commitment to transparency about their decision-making, and they show a pretty clear understanding of what goes into AE. Their philosophy seems to be "investigate carefully, think about the greater good", which is decent as answers go, if not the most informative: I think everyone wants to do good and avoid evil, really. Their answer comes off as a little gun-shy, but they do clearly have the experience, so all in all, it's not so bad.