User talk:Causa sui/arbproposal

I don't think I like it...
If it was easy to just get more people who were willing and qualified to serve as arbs, we could simply increase the size of the current group and work multiple cases in parallel. Getting the inactive members made active would be a big improvement and doesn't require any changes.--Gmaxwell 04:37, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Sorry, how did you find this page? --Ryan Delaney talk 21:13, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Anyway, to respond to your question, I think the advantages of the magistrate system over simply appointing more Arbitrators are these:
 * At present, it's hard to find people whom we can trust to be arbitrators. It's a relatively high-visibility and high-pressure job with a lot of authority. ArbCom members are maybe the only editors on Wikipedia, outside of Board members, who have the authority to dictate policy to the rest of the Wiki. I doubt that it will be easy to find enough people who can be trusted for this job- and as the Wiki gets bigger, it will only get worse.
 * Further, appointing new arbitrators (or activating inactive ones) doesn't even improve the situation, because the current arbitration policy requires all active arbitrators to hear all accepted cases. In other words, more arbitrators doesn't address the problem: Everyone still has to do the same amount of work.
 * Changing the policy to allow some arbitrators to hear some cases, or splitting the Arbcom into two courts (as has been suggested), can't work because then there would effectively be two governing bodies issuing different and competing rulings. This could create a legally incoherent political situation when one Arbcom rules in a particular way and another Arbcom handles the same sort of situation totally differently.
 * Appointing magistrates solves these problems; it will be easier to appoint magistrates without too much worry since a small circle of trusted and board-approved users will be overseeing them. The tiered system means that ArbCom can let the good work get done, but when something goes wrong, there will be a "check" that can step in and issue a correction. Also, the tiered system preserves authoritative consistency, since all Magistrate rulings will have the authority of Arbcom, which have authority from Jimbo. There will be no instances of political ambiguity about which governing body is really in control here.
 * Put simply, the tiered system addresses the scalability problem with little or no drawbacks. Maybe there is a yet better system possible, but I don't know what that would be, and in the mean time it would be wise to revamp the existing system to deal with the very real and debilitating problems we are facing. --Ryan Delaney talk 07:11, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure this system is the best addition, although it seems like it would work. It might be better to have more non-track dispute resolution systems, possibly the addition of a more informal binding arbitration, where the disputants can agree to pick some set of Wikipedians to arbitrate them and if that set agrees then they do. One could have a pool of users who are willing to be selected for such decisions. Obviously this would have some problems, among others that it would require a large amount of AGF and one wouldn't be able to do anything that involved certain types of bad faith problems, like sockpuppets(due to general users not having checkuser) but it could take the load off of some of the more content oriented problems. However, I think your proposed system would be meet scalability well. Possibly adding both of them would do the trick. JoshuaZ 15:17, 20 March 2006 (UTC)