Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/June 2008 announcements/Clarifying the role of the Committee

Following a June announcement by the Arbitration Committee, this page is a summary clarification of the Arbitration Committee's role as a check, balance, safeguard, and last resort on English Wikipedia.

Arbitrators
Arbitrators are users (usually highly regarded and seasoned administrators) who are elected by the community onto the Arbitration Committee in what is probably the most gruelling inquiry and election process on Wikipedia. In these public elections, any user meeting a certain number of edits may stand, and may vote. A successful candidate will routinely have over 200 supporting votes and 80 - 90% support; the most successful candidate on record had over 500 (Newyorkbrad, December 2007).

Jimbo Wales has the power to choose the incoming Arbitrators appointed each year, but in practice for the last 2½ years and three elections, he has after discussion, endorsed the community's choice (with minor adjustment to the lower places 2½ years ago for existing Arbitrators standing again at January 2006).

As well as handling their most public roles - Requests for Arbitration, and the effective last resort of dispute resolution on English Wikipedia - Arbitrators as a committee perform a number of other roles as a check and balance within the complex system of Wikipedia.

Arbitration Committee remit
Wikipedia is not just "a community". It is a community to write an encyclopedia of a certain standard and with certain mandatory policies and norms, including some prescribed at Wikimedia Foundation level, such as privacy policy and neutral point of view, some traditional, some emergent, and some created by the community.

As project leader, Jimbo Wales retains in principle, the highest level of control over the project, although it is almost never exercised to full extent in practice. On a day to day basis he has delegated a range of authority to the Arbitration Committee, including the power to make binding decisions covering himself 2004 ... 2007 and authority to decide certain community matters.

Within that system, the Arbitration Committee serves a number of purposes.

A. Dispute resolution
The first role of the Committee is to handle cases the community cannot, and to decide what handling will allow the project to move forward effectively and best resolve the problem that led to the community failing, if it happens again.

Arbitrated cases are exactly that - the Arbitration Committee considers all factors it is aware of, examines the case for itself, and considers how best the case should be decided to allow it to move forward from its stalled position. A successful case is one which is either resolved, or made far easier to address (possibly no longer needing Arbitrator decisions) if the problematic issues persist. This emphasizes finding ways forward, over perfect solutions or dwelling on the past.


 * Changes in the balance of cases over time
 * A side impact of these cases is that over time, the Committee innovates novel dispute resolution mechanisms for the issues in its cases, which may become used more as time passes, become familiar, and eventually devolve and become used by the community so that they may be operated and the cases of this kind resolved without needing Committee involvement.


 * Examples of remedies first operated in Arbitration cases include topic bans, conduct paroles and restrictions (revert parole, civility, article probation, and the like), sanctions on all users involved in a specific topic or arena ("general sanctions"), and the like.


 * A second side effect is that the Arbitration Committee will always see precisely those cases the community cannot satisfactorily resolve itself; a ratchet effect that ensures at any given time, the Committee's cases are the most troublesome dispute issues needing attention. It is hoped that over time the community will learn from its Arbitration cases how certain kinds of disputes may best be resolved, so that they no longer prove beyond communal capability to handle, in future.


 * In that aim, Wikipedia Arbitration has proven fairly successful. Of about 400 arbitrated cases where the community was unable to resolve the case and a full Arbitration case was heard on a Wiki subpage, less than one in ten (7.5%) as of June 2008 come back for a second time or more. (A number come back purely for change of remedy, not the same thing, and cases are not shy to come back if unresolved.) Around 1 - 1.5% come back a third time. (Approximate statistics only.) Users who breach a ruling and their second chance find that the scope for misconduct and "smoke" following an Arbitration case is usually quite severely limited and readily backed by a ban. There are reasons for this, which are obvious to arbitrators, but which the community has probably never really had explained in detail. (Broadly speaking, Arbitration sheds enough bright light in dark corners as to usually be fatal to serious attempts at hiding bad conduct for any period of time, gaming the system, or getting away with it when discovered.)


 * A further sign of the progress of experience and its devolution to the community is the nature of cases undertaken. Initially, the Committee heard primarily ban cases that were delegated to it by Jimbo Wales. Then it heard ban cases by direct communal request from users. Then community bans were innovated and refined, until at this time (2008) most bans are operated by the community at noticeboards such as the Administrators' incident noticeboard, and far fewer cases are simple "X behaved badly, please ban them" requests. By contrast the cases that have a complex or heated element, or multi-party, has steadily been an increasing feature of cases during the last year.


 * In accordance with this, the number of nuanced decisions has increased - they are often no longer simple "ban/don't ban" decisions, since many other effective restrictions, tools, and know-how exist, including a greatly increased competence by the community itself to handle extreme egregious behavior (if not ceased) on its own.

B. Serious privacy-related issues
A second role is to handle serious privacy-related issues. Harassment cases is one example, access to privacy policy information such as Oversight another.

C. Appeals and serious administrator misconduct allegations
A third role is ban handling/serious admin misconduct allegations. The aim of a ban is that content-writing editors should not be troubled further. The Arbitration Committee takes these cases on, including the safeguard of appeal case handling, for the community, for that purpose. This may change or may not in future.

A further case is where the community cannot come to a consensus as to whether a block or ban was warranted; in exceptional cases an appeal may be made to the Arbitration Committee to have the appeal judged independently.

The aim of an appeal is to determine whether the user was banned or sanctioned, when in fact a lesser remedy may be workable and could have been tried within normal Wikipedia ethos, or whether a user banned some time ago should yet be permitted to return and if so under what conditions. An appeal may also look at whether the actions of the community, or specific administrators, were appropriate and within norms of reasonable judgement.

D. Exceptionally complex investigations and situations
A fourth role is exceptionally complex investigations and situations - high profile, prolific sock-puppet operators, a number of known active sock farms and advocacy groups, handling of a few highly contentious and disruptive areas such as pedophilia advocacy, unusually delicate cases, and so on. Arbitrators, as seasoned and experienced users elected by the community, handle these cases, which would burn out many other editors or otherwise give rise to unhelpful disruption.

Committee members, in their role as communal elected arbitrators, also have access to the privacy-related tools needed to fully investigate serious cases that cannot be examined in full by users generally.

E. Check and balance
A fifth and final role, which in a sense is integral to all of the others, exists too. Arbitrators also, as a committee, act as a check and balance, ensuring the pendulum does not move so far to "the community" that it moves away from its principles and away from the "writing a neutral encyclopedia", so far as to be itself damaging to the project. The community is not monolithic, can (like any large group of people) make poor decisions based on social issues, and at times needs a reminder what matters, what priorities are, to let go of the past more and not dramatize the present, and to resolve disputes (not escalate them) -- even if prurience and external parties wants all the gossip, or loud voices and strident parties want a damning verdict. As editors, we aren't a court or legal system, we're encyclopedia writers. We have traditional norms on a range of editor interactions to ensure that's possible, that guide us pretty well, and those norms include that some matters are deemed not relevant to our activities here, second chances in many cases, seeking ways to "keepe the good editing and remove the bad" of problem editors (non-punitive blocks, topic bans, restrictions etc). Sometimes that can be lost in shouting.

That is where "serving a project to write an encyclopedia" comes into its own. Whilst the communal voice matters, it is only half of the equation, and sometimes it needs balancing by re-affirming the other half (that the community's role is to write an encyclopedia). Despite much discussion and debate, and many attempts to find a working consensus by talk page and project page posting, the community has not achieved what it hoped to on a few issues. On some, time will not wait indefinitely, and novel dispute resolution solutions are innovated and developed.

Post-script
Arbitrators and the Arbitration Committee were not created to be an executive or legislative body. Their aim remaims as it was at the start, to safeguard certain matters, provide a communally elected and mandated body to be custodian of certain serious roles and tasks, to act as a check and balance to the focus of the project and its ethos, and to provide certain "last resort" facilities for which highly experienced editors are a prerequisite. Whilst a degree of innovation and the occasional decision outside the norm may arise, the essence of the role is understanding that the community and the content of the project, are what counts. Arbcom is very much a failsafe for the occasions that the community fails.

In an ideal world, the Arbitration Committee would have little to do - it would all flow without serious difficulty. That ideal world does not yet exist, and likely will not do so in any foreseeable future. The Arbitration Committee occupies a position with one foot firmly in the community and of it, communally elected editors all, and another foot as a check and balance appointed by the same source which designated communal self-organization in the first place.

This page will probably be amended over time. Little stays still on Wikipedia, it's the nature of a wiki. Likely as dispute resolution develops further and new challenges arise, neither will this.

FT2 (Talk 14:31, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

For and on behalf of the Arbitration Committee