While other guides should be treated as purely subjective, this guide may be considered authoritative. ArbCom has improved greatly in the past year, yet there is still great room for improvement. Since these people are running for ArbCom there is no need to pull punches in discussing them.[aside 1]By the way, if anyone has thoughts, I invite you to share them on my talk page. If you think I'm off the mark, I want to know.
Transparency — Perhaps the greatest improvement needed is in transparency. The Arbs are spending too much of their time, and having too much discussion off wiki. Privacy has become a bogeyman that they apply in cases where it is clearly irrelevant. This, of course, lessens the security surrounding those cases where privacy actually does matter. We are trying to create an encyclopedia, not play some MMORPG cloak-and-dagger game of espionage and intrigue. Worse, these games are wasting their time. Time to start behaving like adults and leave the secret machinations to your Warcraft guild's plotting against the Horde.
Temperance — Secondly, we must be vigilant about keeping the ArbCom free of the hysterical moral panic that characterizes some of our more heated discussions. A sense of perspective is critical, but we've seen too many otherwise intelligent people go off the deep end when they become convinced that the crisis du jour is the most important thing ever. It never is. These histrionics tend to set back progress rather than advance it. Radicals are sometimes right, and it's precisely when you agree with them that you must try to stop them before they undermine the cause. It is a lesson for radicals in nearly all walks of life that their hysteria is, almost without fail, counterproductive; of course, the very essence of ineffectual radicals is usually their immunity to the obvious.
Editors unable to collaborate — At some point, we have to recognize that certain people and certain personality types are simply unable to function well in a collaborative environment. We have an encyclopedia to work on. Our system is a collaborative one, so unfortunately even brilliant human beings who are endlessly abusive, offensive, toxic or immune to feedback aren't going to be able to help us. People who do like to collaborate are extremely put off by streams of abuse. Thus, the Main Space contributions of an editor could look fantastic, but if they are relentlessly unable to collaborate, they end up being an enormous net negative to the project.
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