Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-10-17/ArbCom election

This week The Wikipedia Signpost conducted interviews with each of the current Arbitration Committee members. The answers give an "insider's account" of the ArbCom and also lets each of the current members express his/her thoughts. Fennec and Sannse did not respond to the questions.

1. Are you up for election or re-election this year?

   David Gerard (DG): My term runs out end of this year.

   Fred Bauder (FB): Yes.

   Jayjg (J): Well, I was never elected, I was appointed, but my term does expire in December.

   Jdforrester (JF): Yes, I am; all of the temporary appointees' terms end in December.

   Kelly Martin (KM): I haven't made a final decision on whether or not to stand in this year's elections. That decision will not be made until I've had a chance to actually serve on the committee for a while. My bias is to stand for election, though; I've had too many people encourage me to run that I can't not seriously consider it.

   Mindspillage (M): [term ends December 2005.]

   Neutrality (N): No, my term is up in December 2007, more than two years from now; I'll decide whether to run for re-election at that time.

   Raul654 (R): No, I was elected last year to a 3 year term. My term ends in two years.

   Theresa knott (TK): No next year

   The Epopt (TE): No.

2. If so, do you plan to run for re-election?

   DG: Nope. I signed up for a year because I had a good grasp of my attention span ;-) In any case, I'm presently marked inactive owing to work pressures and just a bit of burnout.

   FB: Yes.

   J: Yes, I do.

   JF: I plan to run for election for a second time, yes. Hopefully this time I will be successful. :-)

   M: I'm not sure yet; I'm going to see how the next few weeks go. I wasn't previously planning to run but the experience may change my mind.

   TE: If I were up for re-election, I probably would not run - I don't think judges should be chosen by popularity; I'm certainly not on the ArbComm to make friends. Also, I'm not sure this job is worth going through the Hell that was last year's election.

3. How do you feel about serving on the Arbitration Committee?

   DG: It's worth doing, but crikey it's a lot of work and involves dealing with a lot of utter stupidity.

   FB: Honored, responsible and burdened.

   J: It's an important job, but it takes a lot of time.

   JF: I consider it very interesting work, and certainly useful to the community. However, it occupies quite a lot of my time related to Wikipedia (and Wikimedia generally), which I could otherwise spend doing other things, though quite probably less useful ones. :-)

   KM: A bit overwhelmed, and very humbled. I spent an hour and a half today reviewing evidence and arguments in order to make the decision whether or not to accept a pair of clearly related cases. The amount of material to be reviewed in some cases is outrageous, and we are obliged to review all of it before making any lasting decisions.

   M: It's an honor, of course, but one I tried at first to run screaming away from! :-) Nervous, largely; there are a lot of things to get used to and it's a somewhat high-profile position to make newbie mistakes in. And honored that several people have made known they trust me to do it well.

   N: It is an honor that I am very grateful for. The committee is a vital part of our project and hopefully helps protects the community from those that disrupt it, either through malice, ignorance, or ideological blindness. We are a changing organization, especially of late, and for the most part I feel we are getting more effective at our job. We have a very long way to go, and there are several major problems. I have confidence that these will be rectified soon enough. Generally, after an election there is a burst of productivity, so hopefully by mid-January we can close all currently active cases. I'd like to have this as an official goal.

   R: Although this may sound immodest, I think I have had a positive influence on the committee. While individually and as a whole, the arbcom has made mistakes, when you consider the sheer volume of cases we have to process and the difficulty of each one, I think that's understandable.

   TK: I feel proud to be trusted by the community.

   TE: Tired.

4. What do you think are the strengths of the Arbitration Committee?

   DG: It keeps a lot of rubbish out of Jimbo's in-tray, so he can get on with other things. It gives us a mechanism to get rid of the truly poisonous or the truly clueless.

   FB: Community participation, experiences and common sense.

   J: It's a mechanism for dealing with editors who are damaging Wikipedia, but not so blatantly that they can be summarily banned.

   JF: When cases come all the way to us, the disputes are often difficult and highly acrimonious, and also seemingly never-ending. The Committee's ruling generally causes the problem to end, or at the very least abate significantly. But then, that is the entire point of the Committee, so I would say that.

   M: Its main strength is that for the most part the arbcom is made up of users who are trusted by the community and who have a thorough knowledge of community policies and practices. The several differing points of view represented on the current committee I think helps to find a more fair solution.

   N: We are elected by the community and therefore have legitimacy–authority to act on behalf of all editors. In addition, our group is very diverse. We have members from Australia, Britain, the U.S., and Canada, of both genders. We also have a good basic framework that allows for much due process–many would argue that it offers too much due process that needlessly clogs the system.

   R: One strength is that the members of the arbitration committee are held in high regard in the community. Another strength is that rather than being an assembly line for handing out bans, we try very hard (and not always successfully) to craft remedies that suit the merits of a particular case. Also, so far, the arbitration committee has had a quality of good-faith collaboration. By that, I mean that arbitrators are very cooperative and trusting with one another (knock on wood). Infighting amongst the arbitrators is almost unheard of (I can think of one relatively minor exception but I won't go into details). One of the primary reasons the arbitration committee is possible is because the members trust each other (remember, given the current arbitration committee rules, it's eminently possible for a minority of 3 or 4 arbitrators to "game" the system. However, that would never happen, at least not with the current members).

   TK: I don't know, I'm too close to it to be able to judge.

   TE: We have been given something close to carte blanche to build our own jurisprudence — we are not bound by any procedure or precedent that we have not chosen ourselves. This freedom has allowed us to design a process specifically tailored to our mission of protecting Wikipedia without being distracted by noble but irrelevant concerns.

5. What do you think are the weaknesses of the Arbitration Committee?

   DG: It's not scaling too well - as the wiki gets more popular, the number of editors and hence the number of problem children goes up in proportion - and we're burning through arbs at a horrendous rate. It gets some people thinking in terms of taking editors they're arguing with to the authorities rather than actually trying to work with people they disagree with (The AC Is Not Your Mother. It's the last resort, not the first).

   FB: The work is hard and time consuming for a volunteer job.

   J: It's overloaded, and there's a lot of burnout - sometimes before people even start work. Paradoxically, the Committee sometimes also takes on work in areas in which I think it has no mandate; specifically, it seems to want to gather evidence and prosecute cases, not just adjudicate them.

   JF: The Arbitration Committee is, by design, much slower than any other process on Wikipedia, because we want to consider the cases carefully and try our hardest to come up with workable and successful solutions and remedies to the problems that are brought to us which are in the best interests of the project and the community at large. This slowness has been criticised, and understandably so, but I think it preferable to the Committee rushing through things and being a destructive force.

   KM: I can't fairly comment on these [strengths/weaknesses/changes]. I know I've made several public comments about ArbCom and many suggestions on reform, but even in the short time I've been a member I've realized that some of my prior perceptions were under informed. Reform discussions continue, both in public and in private, but I haven't come to any conclusion what the best thing to do at the moment is.

   M: The obvious weakness is that it is a slow process, hindered by the fact that several members have been inactive: though even at its best it will never be fast. It's also a dirty enough and time-consuming enough job than many qualified people burn out or avoid running at all.

   N: The committee takes a very long time to decide cases. Justice delayed is justice denied, and many of our more troublesome respondents taken advantage of the long decision time by wreaking havoc. Our rate of closing cases needs to be sped up to be consummate. Part of the problem is excessive legalism. I think we should limit the number of principles and findings of fact and possibly even create a single general principle. Another problem is the number of Arbitrators that must vote on each case. If we could create panels of three Arbitrators to work on each case and make a decision–possibly subject to ratification by the full panel or another check–this would drastically speed up our progress.

   R: The arbcom has a great deal of difficulty dealing with certain classes of cases. POV pushing on technical subjects is very difficult to arbitrate (the meteorology dispute); so are cases involving disputes between good users (Everyking-Snowspinner), good users who screw up (Ed Poor) or good users who have one bad habit that requires arbitration (Jguk).

   TK: Still too slow for most cases.

   TE: Sloth — it is an unpleasant, thankless task that is easy to put off; alas, this means that cases take several months to resolve.

6. If you could change anything, what would you change? Why?

   DG: I would wave a magic wand and make the statements and evidence submitted more concise, well-written and clueful. Unfortunately, many problem editors (particularly those too clueless to work with others) are weak on precisely these points.

   FB: I encourage acceptance of cases involving content disputes. There needs to be some resolution of questions which involve sustained edit warring about fixed positions.

   J: On the committee side, I'd like it to stick more closely to its mandate, as in the previous question. On the complainants' side, I wish they would present evidence in a way that doesn't take hours and hours to slog through, and which deals with all sorts of things unrelated to policy.

   JF: It is disappointing that participants in cases do not try to structure nor marshal their arguments in a way that is clear both what they consider wrong in general, and the parts that they are most concerned about. If we were merely concerned in which side presented the better argument, we could just discard them, but we're actually here for the good of the project overall, so we just have to deal with it as best we can. Sometimes it is rather frustrating that we don't force people to actually work at what they want, but I'm not sure that there's much that we can do about it, sadly.

   M: It's really too soon for me to say. Actually, I think members' advocates doing more constructive work and being more fully integrated with the arbitration process would be helpful; sifting through evidence pages is in some cases pretty torturous and would be improved by having a competent person on each side presenting a case.

   N: The speed (see above).

   R: There are several improvements that could be made to make arbitration faster and more efficient. In order (most important to least important) they are: less bureaucracy policies for accepting and resolving cases, alternate lower-order venue(s) for cases to go to (a replacement for the mediation committee, which has never worked), more helpers, and (Mav's idea) a pool a reserve arbitrators to take over when an arbitrator resigns. Just to clarify - when I say more helpers, I mean non-arbitrators who help us sort out a case. This is in contrast to, for example, the AMA, which has never (that I can remember) done anything useful in a case. As Fred (a former lawyer) has said previously, they never actually argue the merits of their case (and given the people I have seen them representing, that's no real surprise). The AMA representatives simply complain about how horribly unfair the proceedings are, how arbitrators S, T, U, V, and W should recuse themselves because they are horribly biased, how the decision is fraught with inequity and is a giant overstepping of power, 'etc. They exclusively argue process instead of proceedings.

   TK: I'd make it less formal and less legalistic.

   TE: I would dramatically increase the number of arbiters, so that when half of them get tired and disappear, the Committee isn't paralyzed by lack of quorum. Of course, finding that large number of arbiters is much easier to type than to do.

7. Do you regret accepting your position? Why or why not?

   DG: Not at all. It's a messy job, but it's got to be done.

   FB: No, this is chance to significantly contribute to a worthwhile project. Other work has suffered, but I think I have filled a need.

   J: No, no regrets. It's an unrewarding job, but I see it as a way of giving back to Wikipedia.

   JF: No, I do not. It's a necessary duty for Wikipedia, and it doesn't tire me the way that it seems to tire others, so I suppose it's my duty to carry it out.

   N: No. Despite the system's flaws, it is an important process that I am glad to take part in.

   R: No, I do not regret accepting the position (or I would have already resigned). As I said above, I think my presence has been positive influence. I ran for the arbitration committee as a result of the Plautus debacle, and since then, things have gotten better (although you wouldn't know it from all the bad press we get).

   TK: A bit. Most of my time on wikipedia used to be spent editing, drawing diagrams and socialising. Now much of my times is spending reading endless talk pages and trying to fathom out what to do about disruptive/nasty POV pushing nutcases. It's soul destroying. But someone's gotta do it.

   TE: No, this is a necessary job, and one that could easily go astray. I'm glad to have had the opportunity to get it started in the right direction.

8. If you could say one thing to the current Arbitration Committee candidates, what would you say, and why?

   DG: "You have not understood the depths of human stupidity on Wikipedia until you have tried to sort out some of these things."

   FB: Be prepared for hard work and occasional second guessing.

   J: Make sure you're really, really committed to sticking it out, and putting in a lot of time.

   JF: Be aware that the worst possible thing that the Committee could do, worse even than effectively stalling for months at a time and not dealing with cases, is to carry out cases in such a way that the community's trust in the Committee is reduced. The Committee only works because we keep that, and it's absolutely vital. We inherited a great deal of responsibility from Jimbo when he delegated his powers to us, and abusing or jeopardising the faith placed in us, even accidentally, would be disastrous.

   KM: "ARE YOU INSANE?" Seriously, ArbCom is a three year commitment to a terribly nasty, difficult, and time-consuming job. Please please please consider if you're willing to commit to spend 10 hours a week for the next three years on this. That goes especially for those of you whose lives are not yet settled (i.e. in school): three years is a LONG time. Don't just run for the prestige of it; being on ArbCom totally changes the way you relate to the rest of the community.

   M: Please consider whether or not you have the time and the temperament for this, and whether you'll still be up for it after the first few months have passed. ("Are you nuts?" is probably also good but not so helpful. :-))

   N: Why are you running? If you're running purely for status, or power, or for a particular agenda, you might want to reconsider your candidacy. Arbitration is hard work. Are you dedicated? Can you afford the time needed to arbitrate? Look at your real life. Do you have some major school- or work-related issues, or vacation, that could interfere with your access to the Internet or available free time? All of these should be considerations.

   If you're running to reform the committee and improve Wikipedia: I wish you the best of luck. Surely there are dozens of qualified candidates–I could probably name 30 that would be suitable.

   If you are unsuccessful in your candidacy: please don't get discouraged. Your comments are always welcome and valued. This especially applied to those who will be very close to winning a seat. Remember, if a member steps down mid-term, Jimbo and the committee will search for an interim appointment, and those people are prime candidates.

   R: <joke> DON'T DO IT!!! </joke> Seriously folks, it's a lousy job. The pay ($0/hour) sucks, the hours stink, and the work is difficult. Very good users will think bad things of you [1]. The job is hard -- very time consuming, difficult to manage, bureaucratic, and easy to screw up.

   TK: You have no idea the amount of time this will suck up.

   TE: You're full of fire and ready to make a difference now, but will you still be so determined in six months? Don't sign up unless you're prepared to go the distance. Arbitrating is not a sprint, it's a marathon, through the mud, and there's no glory in it even if you do finish.

9. Do you think your job is easy or hard?

   DG: It's difficult and stressful. You have to be extremely clueful, be seen to be extremely clueful, and have a skin like a rhinoceros. Everyone will want a piece of you.

   FB: Done well, the work is quite hard, due to the complexity of the evidence considered and the time burden in viewing it, when a matter is hotly disputed either among us or within the community it can be emotionally upsetting.

   J: It's difficult, for the reasons listed above, and because you have to try to get to the bottom of sometimes very messy and confusing cases.

   JF: Elements of being an Arbitrator are quite hard - analysing the evidence is often difficult, and made more so by counter-productive ways in which complaints and items of evidence are displayed. Then there's taking the flak - whatever decision you come to, at least one party will likely feel slighted at least partially. Sometimes this goes quite a bit further (death threats and to a lesser extent other threats of violence are not unknown, though they have become significantly less common of late, and then there are the obvious elements of vague legal threats, and rude emails generally). The main difficult is probably the workload - reading through reams of posts is tiring work, and not everyone (or anyone, really) would find it fun.

   KM: Definitely it will be a hard job. One of the biggest problems it that it's a lot harder to tell if someone is lying to you in text; you can't see body language, hesitation, facial expression, etc. We have to decide cases based on examining reams of text dumped on us (usually with no organization and little rational explanation), and that's really not easy at all.

   M: Hard, mostly. Not only sorting through the evidence presented, by no means easy, but also the knowledge that a bad call has a strong effect on the community, and the knowledge that my decisions here are going to affect my relationships with other users. I've also never been a party to an arbitration case (tried to stay far away from it), so learning the process is the first hurdle.

   N: Sometimes it is easy, sometimes it is hard. There are several complex cases that involve charts and long lists of edits and transgressions. Arbitrating between two well-known members of the community are the hardest, especially when both are respected. It is often frustrating to deal with obstinate or malicious users; it is most enjoyable when these users are banished from our community.

   TK: Occasionally easy (some cases are straightforward but not many), but usually hard.

   TE: Both, of course. It is hard to make sense of the mountains of argumentation we're given as evidence, but once I've read through it, a decision is usually very easy. There are exceptions, but most subjects of arbitration are clearly liabilities to Wikipedia.

10. Looking back with hindsight, is there anything you would have done differently?

    DG: Not sure. The process needs streamlining, but it's not clear how to.

    FB: I have sometimes slacked off for a period.

    J: I haven't been at it long enough yet to have much of a retrospective.

    JF: Not really. I could be rather asinine and say that I wish I'd devoted more time overall, but I could always say that. There isn't really a limit to how much time you can end up spending.

    TE: No, I don't have any significant regrets. There are cases I would have handled somewhat differently, if I knew then what I know now, but only in degree, not kind.

11. Do you feel that the Arbitration Committee is appreciated by the community? If not, how do you think that could be changed?

    DG: Mostly, I think. We need to work faster.

    FB: Yes, although the community sometimes ascribes more ability, time and wisdom to us than we actually enjoy.

    J: I think it is appreciated to an extent, but would be much more appreciated if it worked more quickly. Ideally no case should take more than a month from first submission to final remedies.

    JF: Sometimes, certainly, it feels like the Committee not being appreciated that much by the community gets some of us down, but again this problem seems insurmountable, really. When we do well, people don't really notice that much - there's merely one iota less friction in the system. When we do less well, however, people complain readily. :-) This is even more significantly a problem in mediation, both formal and informal, and as these underpin the dispute resolution process and are vital to making the Arbitration process work at all, really.

    KM: I think too many people treat the ArbCom as an annoyance, to be used only when another annoyance is causing trouble. ArbCom is not your mother.

    M: For the most part, yes, as much as it is complained about; it's a dirty job. The AC exists because the community cannot always come to a consensus itself, and must refer the problem somewhere else.

    R: Being on the Arbitration Committee is the most thankless job on Wikipedia. It is absolutely impossible to do it such that people are happy with you. If you are doing a bad job, people complain; if you are doing a good job, people don't notice (or sometimes even then complain). All of your actions are examined under a microscope. People expect you to be the Oracle of all truth - to work miracles no matter how complicated the case, no matter how bad the evidence, no matter how hostile and stubborn the disputants. And of course, there are the accusations of cabalism. - Raul's 9th law. Delerium (accurately, IMO) called it "the most karma [reputation] damaging thing you can do on Wikipedia"

    TE: I don't think the ArbComm is noticed much by the community, and that's the way it should be. While being appreciated is nice, before working on that, I'd rather work on getting the community to be more reluctant to involve the Committee in their affairs. Arbitration should be a painful last resort, only invoked when all other avenues of reconciliation are exhausted.

12. What is the most frustrating thing about being on the Arbitration Committee? What is the most enjoyable?

    DG: The most frustrating thing is dealing with cases which should never reach the AC and which are really Foolishness vs. Foolishness. The really enjoyable bit is making Wikipedia a better place to work by ejecting the really poisonous troublemakers.

    FB: Failure of other arbitrators to have the time and energy to provide enough input is frustrating as is reluctance to propose alternatives when they oppose something. The most enjoyable is sometimes figuring out what is causing a difficulty.

    J: I find the lack activity on the part of many members to be frustrating; it really slows things down. The most enjoyable part is (hopefully) making Wikipedia a better place.

    JF: The most enjoyable part of being an Arbitrator is the sense that you are doing something significant for the community. The most frustrating part, really, is the lack of recognition. But such is life.

    KM: The most frustrating thing is not commenting on, or being involved in, cases or issues that are before us or likely to soon be before us. I used to be an informal mediator, something which I really can't do anymore since any case I mediate has a good chance to appear before the ArbCom later. And I have, for some time now, been active in policy discussions and community management activities. I've had to curtail much of that as a result of my appointment. A lot of my friends are mediators, and my appointment puts an unavoidable distance between them and me. I'm not sure what I enjoy about this, except the opportunity to help make Wikipedia better. Gee, you're starting to convince me not to run now....

    M: Also too soon to say. Most frustrating I think will be having to restrict what I say about ongoing cases, having to deal with users who think I've treated them unfairly, and spending time reading evidence instead of writing. Most enjoyable I expect to be having some influence in the way the decisions are made, and helping to see that something I think is an acceptable solution is done.

    R: Being on the arbcom has so many frustrations; it's sort of hard to single any one of them out. Being vastly overworked is probably the worst part (and the sense that the work is never-ending; that there will always, always be more case to arbitrate). As for being enjoyable, as I'm sure I've made clear by now, there's not a whole lot there to enjoy. I suppose I "enjoy" (and I use the word loosely) being on the committee in the sense that I have some sort of control over what we do with troublemakers. Given the choice of working on the arbitration committee and the alternative I experienced last year (being powerless while Plautus was running amok), I suppose prefer being on the committee. (Is that power-tripping? I'm sure there are some people who would say it is, but I think it's a very common sense position to take)

    TE: The most frustrating thing is the difficulty we have in closing cases, caused by vanishing arbiters. The most enjoyable is successfully removing from our community those that hinder the creating of a free encyclopedia.

13. Do you have any other thoughts?

    KM: I would like to ask people who bring requests before the Committee to please respect our 500 word pleading limit, and when submitting their evidence to please explain what the evidence link they're presenting is supposed to prove. Lay the case out for us; don't make us find it buried in a haystack of uncaptioned diffs.