Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015/Candidates/Gamaliel/Statement

Gamaliel
The most important thing we can do on Wikipedia is to facilitate content creation. That means content creation by everyone, regardless of who they are or how much experience they have as an editor. Issues such as harassment and civility are not, as some would have it, a necessary part of content creation, but inhibit content creation by many current and potential editors.

The Committee has a difficult job. While it is filled with well-meaning individuals, collectively they have favored narrow decisions that focus on the behavior of a few editors while ignoring systemic issues plaguing Wikipedia and prioritize policy compliance over normal expectations of behavior in extraordinary circumstances. The Committee cannot create policy, but it can use the matters before it to address systemic issues, which many parts of the community are demanding it do.

Offline, people are energized and optimistic about the possibilities of Wikipedia. Online, the community is fractious and the environment often toxic, exacerbated by the failure to address these issues head-on. Enough is enough.

Were I to serve, my priorities will be to:


 * Demand zero tolerance for harassment.
 * Push for the Committee to receive professional training in mediation and harassment, funded by a WMF grant.
 * Push to expand the Committee to properly handle the workload. The demands on the Committee members are high, often leading early departure.

I have been a Wikipedia editor for eleven years and an administrator for ten. I have created more than a thousand articles and I have nearly seventy thousand edits. Offline, I am a librarian and professor at a mid-sized university in the US. Wikipedia is the focus of my academic research.

I am not the perfect editor or candidate. A decade is a long time, and it is full of many examples where I could have acted better or made a better decision. Likewise, I do not demand perfection of other editors nor would I demand it of parties before the Committee. I only ask what I try to do, and that is for editors to acknowledge their mistakes and strive to do better, instead of loudly insisting that disruption is the correct path. A perfect candidate who offends no one and makes no errors avoids controversial problems, and we need people willing to attempt to solve those problems and risk making mistakes to do so, instead of standing by doing nothing.

Mandatory declarations: I will comply with all policies for dealing with non-public data and have already signed a confidentiality agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation to do so as part of my work with The Wikipedia Library. I do not recall ever doing any editing with another account.