Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-01-30/ArbCom Clerks

The Arbitration Committee's Clerk Office officially began work this week, following the appointment of a head clerk and several associate clerks. The clerks' duties are to assist Arbitrators and keep the Arbitration process running smoothly; tasks include opening cases and closing cases with enough votes, creating each case's subpage, summarizing evidence for each case, and assisting in writing decisions. Appointed clerks were Ryan Delaney, Tony Sidaway, Johnleemk, Phil Sandifer, and Tznkai; in addition, former Arbitrator Kelly Martin was appointed chair, a position which requires that the officeholder have been an Arbitrator.

The office was created after discussion by the newly-elected ArbCom and Jimbo Wales; all felt that the office was a good idea because of its potential to speed the process and take some of the workload off the Arbitrators.

"I support [the new positions]," commented Arbitrator Matthew Brown. "Wikipedia is getting bigger, and the number of ArbCom cases will inevitably increase. Help with the mechanical mechanisms of the ArbCom and in helping present evidence will improve the ArbCom's efficiency, which I think we all agree needs to be better." In addition, clerk Tony Sidaway also voiced his praise for the idea. "The Committee normally has many cases on its hands and is chronically short-staffed. It does not have the resources to undertake massive refactoring of ill-assorted evidence, and the quality of arbitration findings could suffer from this incapacity... Until now, purely mechanical tasks such as opening a case have been undertaken by arbitrators... Now the Committee has a dozen appointed clerks available to do it."

However, other users expressed hesitation at the idea. "I strongly disagree with the clerk's task of writing summaries of the evidence for the ArbCom from which they'll work," stated FeloniousMonk. "Summaries written by clerks is an all-too-tempting opportunity for the injection of personal view in a case to influence a particular outcome." Despite the fears, Arbitrators reassured people that the clerks would not influence their opinions. "I for one have no intention of solely following the clerks' opinions," said Arbitrator Sam Korn. "I only intend to use their summaries as a place to start research into a case."

The discussion also involved questions on whether or not the clerks should have access to the private Arbitration mailing list. Although the proposal had at first granted clerks full access to the list, after community discussion, it was changed to write-only access. Currently, though, none of the clerks except Kelly Martin, a former Arbitrator, have access to the list. (Former Arbitrators have traditionally retained access to the list.)

The clerks began work on the twenty plus cases the Arbitration Committee currently has; Template:ArbComOpenTasks was also modified to reflect the creation of the office.