Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2018/Candidates/Drmies/Statement

Drmies

 * Hi. I served on ArbCom in 2016 and 2017, and would like to do so again.

I find ArbCom to be a kind of necessary evil, except that it's not evil. It should be a last resort, and I think that in the last couple of years it has indeed become more of that, with fewer high-profile cases (something that started before my tenure--I take no credit for that), and fewer high-profile cases also means fewer opportunities for the community to rip itself apart.

One of the things I learned is that much ArbCom work is done behind the scenes. Some of that is administrative, governing the use of CU and alternative accounts and stuff like that. Other issues are highly privacy-sensitive, and when I was on ArbCom we dealt with a fair number of them. Like others, I don't have much of a platform to run on, though transparency is one of them--and it's ironic, or unfortunate, or both, that in some cases it's impossible to be transparent, and the community will just have to take ArbCom's word for it. All the more reason to vote in trusted editors, and I hope some of you trust me along with this slate of other candidates, some of whom are among the editors whose judgment and discretion I trust most.

OK, I maybe have one thing to offer to you: I want the WMF to be much more proactive when it comes to harassment. And I'm not talking about civility, which is a big thing but cannot be pursued by the WMF or easily mandated by Arbcom--I mean the very real online harassment some of our editors experience from various trolls and socks. I've asked for this repeatedly, already when I was on the committee, and will continue to do so.

I have a few alternative accounts, all of which are disclosed to ArbCom, and none of which get in the way of "usual" business. For the peanut gallery, I'll be a bit more specific: I used to have a few "funny" accounts, but I forgot their names, and if I remember correctly they were created for me by someone else. It's been ages. I have an account I use for teaching Wikipedia classes. And I have a near-dormant account, last used in May of last year, which has a female user name and was an experiment in seeing how female editors are treated; she's not been very active, and what she's done has been mostly in article, not Wikipedia space. It's a very busy time for me right now workwise, and I hope I will be able to answer all y'all's questions in a timely manner--but next spring should be more calm than this.