Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2009/Candidate statements/Steve Smith

Steve Smith

 * For reasons that I cannot fully fathom, let alone articulate, I am offering myself for election to the Arbitration Committee. I have been an administrator since January 2008, authored eight featured articles, helped many other editors improve their articles through the Good Article, Peer Review, and Featured Article processes, answered many media copyright questions, closed several contentious deletion and article move discussions, and involved myself with the odd problem editor.


 * In real life, I am a 27 year old Canadian law student. Besides the obvious applicability of parts of my academic program, I have been the presiding officer of several boards and committees, some of which have included a disciplinary component.  Right now, I am associate chair of the University of New Brunswick's disciplinary committee, in which capacity I hear cases of non-academic misconduct and chair the committee charged with determining guilt and meting out sentences.


 * Unlike with my two candidacies for the WMF Board of Trustees, I am not running for the Arbitration Committee with a revolutionary agenda. I think ArbCom has taken significant steps in the right direction, and I want to support those and do my part to prevent this election from being a backlash against those steps.  I would like to see ArbCom more assertive in sanctioning content-related misconduct: stonewalling, repeatedly making arguments not framed in Wikipedia's core content policies (such as by failing to invoke sources), cherry picking sources, etc.


 * I cannot pledge not to disappoint, but I can promise that most of the disappointed will be those who weren't paying much attention to my record and words.