Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015/Candidates/Casliber

key success factors of the linux community
linus torvalds created a community of programmers working on the linux kernel 1991. the community grew since then to nowadays 5'000 commits a month, 5 times more than 10 years ago. alone the linux kernel mailing list receives more than 20'000 messages a month, 3 times more than 10 years ago. innovative technologies are added to the kernel first from universities, individuals, companies, bearing the GPL. what do you see as the key success factors of that development, and what can you take off that into your work at wikipedia? --ThurnerRupert (talk) 15:25, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I am not very familiar with the Linux story - on a bigger picture wikipedia has been developing and strengthening links with various educational institutions around the world. It is in its early stages, but not sure how this could link to governance, but it might in the future have something to do with some form of content review board or something. Certainly the more active contributors means more ideas, which is a Good Thing. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:51, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure the Linux community's experience is as informative to ENWP as it would be to another community of coders (say, SourceForge). What encourages me about Cas Liber is his background in psychiatry.  The value of considerable experience helping people overcome dysfunctional behavior to arbitration in general and to Wikipedia arbitration specifically ought to be great. loupgarous (talk) 23:08, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Broader role for ArbCom
Sorry for the long post, but you touched a nerve.

"If we restrict arb cases to socking, edit-warring and incivility we are leaving wikipedia wide open to organised assaults by parties seeking to influence content (i.e. we're screwed)." You've got my vote because of this. I agree that ArbCom needs to focus more on big-picture issues that give guidance, set precedents, and work out the gray areas, accepting cases based on their potential impact across all of WP, not just the experience of a few editors, or a small set of articles. Right now it seems that the editor with the most time to spare and who shouts the loudest determines our content, and ArbCom can never keep up with that. We need better guidance on the ground, and we need to have a culture of following that guidance. Right now there is an acronym to support any viewpoint anyone wants to push, and anyone who ventures into editing articles of a new subject can find a hostile reception if they are not already indoctrinated into the absurdly different cultures we have for editing different article types by different standards. There is nothing systematic about the way we go about creating and expanding articles, or like you alluded to, how we use sources.

When ArbCom finds someone has been edit warring and sanctions them, how does that help the rest of us? We already know we shouldn't edit war and that we might face sanctions if we do. Yeah, we need arbitration and an enforcement mechanism, but if ArbCom determines a certain kind of behavior shouldn't be considered edit warring, or that another kind should be, that's much more important. That affects all of us. In the American legal system, appellate courts don't address findings of fact, only findings of law. (Juries find facts.) In ArbCom terms, how do policies apply in this type of case? Are policies being applied fairly? Are current policies adequate? Is the system of disseminating policies to editors adequate? What chance does the average editor have of understanding fundamental policies and therefore noticing policy violations by parties seeking to influence our content for their gain? It's madly inconsistent at the ground level. (e.g., In disaster articles, the source with the highest death toll seems to be the one we go with.)

But how would you make that work? The alleged sockpuppets and edit warriors need their fair hearing. It would seem to mean either restructuring ANI or adding another level of binding dispute resolution between ANI & ArbCom. Dcs002 (talk) 07:20, 2 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Yeah...good points. My thinking was that like Manual of Style, gradually more content would have consensus segments and articles, with RfCs etc. Hopefully establishing a sensible consensus in more areas as time goes on. Luckily, many people are sensible and alot of intuitive consensus materal has been established. There are tricky areas though, and these are important to get consensus based on high-quality sourcing. RfC is an existing policy that can be used more broadly and bindingly than it is currently. Rules for socking and edit-warring need to be as easy to understand and unambiguous as possible. As far as arbcom sanctioning editors that break rules, when I was on arbcom we tried to be as internally consistent as possible - i.e. consistent remedies for equivalent behaviours. I can't speak for the current arbs and haven't examined recent cases to offer an opinion on these. (more later) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 09:02, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply, and thanks for being one of only a few candidates who still seems to be talking to us voters at this point. A number of candidates seem to have left the arena :/ Dcs002 (talk) 04:19, 3 December 2015 (UTC)