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This is unquestionably the worst ArbCom we've seen since 2009. It is off the rails, using all the worst interpretations of policy I've seen in many a year. As a list of grievances:
- The topic banning of Ohconfucius was very poorly grounded in policy. I was at least heartened to see that it only passed by a narrow margin, still, it passed. And just as bad is the associated finding of fact, which contained a rather blatant "anti-X = pro-Y" fallacy (some arbs tried to explain this away; I found their comments highly unpersuasive).
- The Perth case nearly turned into the most draconian decision ever rendered. Some members of the committee seemed convinced it was their job to do so to make sure admins were accountable to the community. A noble cause, I suppose, but no one actually called for a desysopping, and many called for clemency. And almost without exception, the arbs who supported the desysoppings didn't show any sign they gave a flying feather what people were doing on the talk page, rather, they just ignored it. (SirFozzie was an exception; while I disagreed pretty thoroughly with his reasoning, he deserved at least a pat on the back for communicating with the folks.)
- The attempted ban of Malleus was a horrible abuse of process. Someone asked for clarification, that was all, and we got a ban proposal that nearly passed. It's also more of the committee's usual enforcement of conduct over content nonsense. The one point I can credit the committee on is that nearly all of them repudiated the odious comment one of them made about Malleus being "not a Wikipedian". Then again, the fact that they've been unwilling to censure a colleague who tries to rigidly enforce the civility policy whilst being unwilling to follow it himself is not particularly heartening.
- The recent R&I motion was another "close call", in that it failed, but would have set a really bad precedent, both for overturning AE admin action on a hunch and in suggesting that if you hammer your opponents with wiki-litigation for long enough, something's guaranteed to stick.
And there are a couple ongoing issues that the committee never ever resolves: It's still far, far too difficult to get discretionary sanctions or any meaningful action on geographic conflict areas outside the Anglophone world. Whenever one of these areas flares up, we have to deal with the trouble of all the prior steps of dispute resolution plus a case itself to get any meaningful results, by which time good users have already burnt out. (A common answer we get is "ask for general sanctions from the community". This does not work. Only areas of interest to Anglophones get these, for example, the recent US political ones, or the older Abortion ones. Geopolitical disputes outside the Anglophone world get nothing.)
My previous point also gets at another one: Cases still take too bloody long. Despite all the committee's apparent attempts to streamline process, they just seem to be getting slower and slower. And, as a bit of a corollary, what I find particularly frustrating is how cases sit at evidence for weeks on end, then, once the proposed decision's up, votes come in like owl post at Privet Drive, and the case gets wrapped up with barely any time for community comment.
So, those are the things I'd like to see get better, and will be looking for candidates I think can do better than this. Oh, and my usual rule that I am not interested in having civility cops on the committee still applies. Now onto the candidates!