Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2010/Candidates/Sandstein/Statement

Sandstein
Hi, I'm Sandstein, and like other candidates I've decided to put forward my candidacy in order to provide the community with a wider range of people to choose from. I started contributing to Wikipedia in earnest in 2005 and do administrative work since 2006. I've written a number of articles, including two "good articles" and several "did you know?" entries. I'm also contributing as an amateur photographer and administrator to Wikimedia Commons, and I've made occasional contributions to the German and, lately, the French language Wikipedia. I'm a member of the WP:OTRS team as well.

In my professional life, I'm a lawyer and have previously worked as a law clerk at an appellate court. This may explain my interest in structured dispute resolution on Wikipedia: I've been active in helping to address conduct disputes on administrator noticeboards, the arbitration enforcement board and other fora for several years, and regularly process unblock requests. Among my contributions to our dispute resolution framework are the templates for arbitration enforcement requests and appeals, and the first version of the guide to appealing blocks.

I volunteer to serve on the Arbitration Committee because I've come to realize that our community-based dispute resolution system has great trouble resolving certain types of disputes, notably those involving ideologically polarized groups of editors and those involving recurring problematic conduct by otherwise valued vested contributors. I would like to make a contribution towards helping to resolve such disputes as swiftly and effectively as possible, and thereby make editing less stressful for most of my editor colleagues. And, of course, I would like to be free to complain about how bad our future ArbComs are at doing this (even though the current team is doing a pretty good job). But I can't in good conscience bitch about ArbCom until I've at least attempted to do the job myself...

My disclosure of alternative accounts can be found here.