Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-04-04/Arbitration policy revote

A second vote, held in an effort to implement some amendments to the arbitration policy, ended last week with none of the proposed amendments meeting the criteria for passage.

At stake in this referendum were a number of different changes to the provisions of the arbitration policy, each being voted on separately. Many of the changes were proposed in order to bring the formal policy in line with the actual practices of the Arbitration Committee.

The vote started on 14 March after a controversy over the implementation of the previous vote, and ran through last Monday, 28 March. Each different amendment needed to have 80% support, with at least 100 total votes, in order to pass. While some of the changes had enough support in terms of percentage, none managed to reach the 100-vote threshold.

Three proposed changes would have passed if percentage alone had been the standard. The first of these would have added a reference to other forms of dispute resolution besides mediation, while the other two were intended to confirm the current format in which arbitration is handled in terms of using subpages and the organization of arbitration rulings.

The original vote
The arbitration policy has received no significant updates since the creation of the arbitration process at the beginning of 2004. A proposed amendment was voted on last November, consisting of several of the items that were later voted on individually. The amendment easily exceeded the 70% support required at the time for passage, but did not meet a target stated at the outset of having at least 100 total votes in order to qualify as adopted.

After no action was taken initially, Jimbo Wales stepped in on 11 March to declare the amendment ratified based on the strength of support it received. This prompted complaints from several people about changing the rules after the voting had already taken place, which in turn led to starting a second vote.

When closing the original vote, Wales said he thought the threshold of 100 total votes for adoption was "overly ambitious", and apparently it proved to be too ambitious for the revote as well. This is in spite of the fact that the revote didn't specify a 500-edit voter eligibility requirement, as the first vote had. However, the two-week time period and the extent to which the vote was advertised still failed to bring in enough voters to satisfy the 100-vote threshold on any proposal.

Given the ongoing difficulty in having a successful vote to amend the policy, and in the traditional spirit of collaborative editing, Tim Starling and a few others opposed the concept of having community votes to amend the arbitration policy at all. As Starling put it, "Just edit the policy page."