Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections January 2006/Candidate statements/Magicalsaumy

Hallo all! I have browsed, admired and edited articles on Wikipedia for more than six months. It is a wonderful site as a comprehensive encyclopaedia, but the arbitration committee needs to handle the disputes more effectively and impartially (including the fact that hoax claims must not be highly entertained). Hence I feel that the members of the arbitration committee need to have a sufficiently large knowledge base, so that they could distinguish points which conform to the neutral point of view from those that are naïvish and that have been added out of emotional ecstacy. As far as knowledge with relevance to India, Hinduism, Indian philosophy, Hindi, linguistics, phonetics, engineering, Indian Institues of Technology are concerned, I feel that I am a good candidate for this post. I also propose a strict action against vandalism. I request you all to consider me for this opportunity.

As for myself, I am Mr. Saumya Ranjan (appearing in wikipedia under the name of Cygnus_hansa), a fourth year Chemical Engineering student from the prestigious insitute IIT Bombay. I have been editing various articles, especially those related to Hinduism, for a long time to bring them in conformity to the neutral point of view and yet with an Indian perspective.

Question
What are your views of the proposed Arbitration Committee Code of Conduct and User Bill of Rights?

--  HK   15:52, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Concerns over personal attack templates
User:Improv, who is also a candidate for the arbitration committee, has placed the following statement on Village pump (policy):


 * I am concerned about |recent templates surviving AfD that appear to contrast with established policy. In particular, I feel that these templates are Poisoning the well when it comes for how we treat our fellow wikipedians. There are circumstances where knowing too much about one's neighbours politicises how one deals with them. This is, to an extent, unavoidable in society, but wearing signs of hate as badges on our shoulders takes what is a small problem that we can usually deal with into the realm of being damaging to the community. Already, there have been signs of people refusing to help each other because they are on different ends of a political spectrum -- this seems likely to get worse if this trend continues. Some people cry that this is an attack on their first amendment rights (if they're American, anyhow), but that doesn't apply here because Wikipedia is not the U.S. government -- it is a community that has always self-regulated, and more importantly it is an encyclopedia with a goal of producing encyclopedic content. We have a tradition of respecting a certain amount of autonomy on userpages, but never absolute autonomy. We might imagine, for example, templates with little swastikas saying "this user hates jews". I am not saying that such a thing would be morally equivalent to this template against scientology, but rather that we should aim to minimise that aspect of ourselves, at least on Wikipedia, so we can make a better encyclopedia. The spirit of NPOV does not mean that we cannot have strong views and still be wikipedians, but rather that we should not wear signs of our views like badges, strive not to have our views be immediately obvious in what we edit and how we argue, and fully express ourselves in other places (Myspace? Personal webpage?) where it is more appropriate and less divisive.

I am inviting all candidates, including Improv, to expand on this theme on their questions pages. Do you agree that this is a cause for concern as we move into 2006? How do you see the role of the arbitration committee in interpreting the interpretation of Wikipedia policy in the light of this concern? --Tony Sidaway|Talk 20:49, 12 January 2006 (UTC)