Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2021/Candidates/Enterprisey/Statement

Enterprisey


Hi everyone. I joined about nine years ago and took up the mop in early 2019. My recent focuses have been technical contributions and the new editor experience. I’m running to apply my skills and experience to help out with arbitration. I would bring a strong track record of courtesy and a careful method of handling disputes to the committee.

I believe arbs should be humble, empathetic, approachable, trustworthy, calm, and self-aware. They must communicate well and change their minds when presented with new evidence.


 * While there is a rich literature about the dynamics of online communities and how they can be enjoyable and productive, it’s rarely referenced in onwiki moderation discussions. I believe there's a lot we can learn from other communities, like the Rust programming language community.
 * There is a perception of the committee as some ivory-tower creature that doesn't have enough empathy for what people go through. That’s bad. Although you can't always please everyone, I do think maintaining community trust is of paramount importance.
 * We should be more creative with solutions to allow people to keep contributing and we must remain empathetic to people who've contributed vast sums of content. I have deep respect for people who put countless hours into research and writing. However, in no way can the fourth pillar be compromised. Users who consistently engage before they've ready to collaborate effectively are not long-term sustainable for the project. Intervention in those cases is not overreaching but essential. This goes double for admins. As the committee is the only venue for overseeing advanced permissions, the bar for accepting cases must not be too high.
 * We must take a more proactive stance on preventing harassment, and the committee is in a unique position to counter this problem. I support educating the community about common methods of manipulation (e.g. DARVO) and doing our best to get problematic behavior reported faster.

I don't imagine any problems with meeting the time commitment. Worst comes to worst, I can stop reading so many books :)

I'll also keep working on my other projects: I remain deeply concerned about the new editor experience, the state of recent-changes patrolling, and our medieval workflows.

Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to answering your questions and hopefully earning your vote.

My current/previous usernames are listed in my userspace and I will fully comply with the criteria for access to non-public data.