User:Tryptofish/ACE2023

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Go away! Don't read this!
You really should not care what I say here. I'm not a reliable source, and everything that follows is nothing more than original research. The entire voter guide system is flawed. Many of the guide writers have axes to grind, and a lot of guides are just weird. I do hope that you will vote in the election, and that you will think carefully about your vote. But voter guides should not be taken too seriously. And if you are here just for the lulz, you are going to be disappointed by how boring my opinions are.

I don't try to predict the outcome. (In 2016, my supports predicted the outcome with 100% accuracy, but don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen again!) Rather, I try to give you good faith advice about who would or would not serve best on the Committee, based on my long-time close observation and my participation in cases. I don't do "neutral" or "abstain", so I'm going to offer an opinion on every candidate, for better or for worse. There are eight seats to be filled in this election, with ten candidates running. I usually don't try to support exactly eight candidates and oppose the rest (so called "strategic voting"), but I do try to align my level of support approximately with the level of need.

This year, I'm supporting nine candidates for the eight open seats. I don't label my supports or opposes as being "strong" or "weak", but you can get a feel for those nuances if you read my comments, which you definitely should.

I don't have any litmus tests, but I look for candidates whom I trust. I consider how well a candidate's views match up with where I think the community is at, and how I think the particular candidate will fit in as one member of a committee. That latter point includes how well the candidate communicates with the community and is inclined towards transparency, and how well I think they will be able to handle the tensions of the workload and the controversies. I think it's important to care about improving how the Committee works. I also care about willingness to consider the evidence, to not act rashly, and – especially – to listen to community feedback and to change one's mind in response to feedback.

This year, I've paid special attention to whether ArbCom might be getting too far out over their skis, although this is not a single-issue voter guide. The community puts a lot of faith in the Committee, and the community needs to be vigilant that the Committee does not get carried away with that. In this year's Holocaust in Poland case, ArbCom took the unusual step of making themselves the filing party (although there had been previous requests from the community, some public and some private), largely on the impetus of an offsite publication. And the case ended up being as much about mediating a content dispute as about conduct, contrary to what the community has empowered the Committee to do. I've asked the candidates about this on the "questions" page, and will link to their answers where relevant. (No one gave an answer that fully satisfied me, but I looked for an acknowledgement that there are problems with doing cases this way, except as a rarity.)

Per this discussion, I want to offer candidates the opportunity to rebut anything that I say here. Please feel free to do so at User talk:Tryptofish/ACE2023, and if you do, I'll make a notation in the table below, just to the right of my recommendation, so that anyone looking here will be directed to it.

And finally...
Being on ArbCom is a difficult and largely thankless task, but if it is done right, it makes Wikipedia a better place for the rest of us. Thank you to everyone who is a candidate in this election, and to all of the outgoing Committee members!