I've decided not to list who I'll be voting for in this year's Arbcom election, and have also held off until almost the last minute. But here are considerations that weigh on my decision.
In 2015 I set out my personal reform agenda for Arbcom. Looking back now, my priorities have changed very little, so with some sadness that we have made only a start on fulfilling these aims, I'll quote it:
I am anxious for us to take the opportunity this year to reform ArbCom. I want it to become less of a law court, I want it to take fewer cases because more get solved before reaching that point, and I want people on the committee who think less in terms of precedent than in terms of finding solutions, and are not afraid to admit that they or a former ArbCom made a mistake. Above all I want the committee to hold above all else that piece of boilerplate that they vote up at the start of every remedy:
- The purpose of Wikipedia is to create a high-quality, free-content encyclopedia in an atmosphere of camaraderie and mutual respect among contributors.
This means that what I want in an Arbitrator is not unlike what I want in an administrator: sympathy for the wide variety of people in the community, mindfulness that writing and improving articles is our purpose here, clue and willingness to act on it including willingness to try a new solution, and fairness. I'll be settling for a group of candidates who collectively embody these ideals. What I do not want is: further hardening of ArbCom into a legal body that makes decisions based on its own precedents, further importation of politics into ArbCom decision making, favoritism based on friendships, or genuflection to the WMF, whose desires are orthogonal to the needs of the encyclopedia and the community, and who are not our bosses.
In 2015, I could not support former Arbcom members who voted to topic ban Eric Corbett from discussing the putative gender disparity on Wikipedia. Happily, that issue does not arise in 2017: Worm That Turned recused himself, no others are candidates. Three concerns remain:
- An issue about which I care deeply and that has remained unresolved is the conflict over differing interpretations of civility. The project depends on breadth as well as depth of participation: drawing on editors of every age and profession, with and without higher education, from every part of the globe and from every social class. What matters here is the shared mission of writing an encyclopedia, not one-upmanship or adherence to familiar social niceties. We alienate good potential editors if we allow the editing environment to be corroded by vindictiveness, snark, and combativeness. We also alienate good potential editors if we distil civility into a list of banned words. This is not a church picnic (as better editors than I have said); nor is it a debating contest; nor is it any one editor's familiar workplace, family dinner table, pub, classroom, or national prime-time TV. Gerda's question to the candidates shook loose some responses on this issue: I must oppose any candidate who equates "bad words" with incivility, even while recognizing that for editors from certain backgrounds—including some entire countries—an environment where "adult" language is not de facto "immature" is a shock. On the flip side, I would welcome candidates who explicitly say that they take a dim view of the combative approach to discussion, including sarcasm.
- Because the strength of the project is in the breadth as well as the depth of the editorship, and in no small measure also because we were promised anonymity when we signed up, I have always been a firm believer in the right to retain anonymity. In fact I hold this to be vital for female editors, among other specific classes of editors. This is one of several areas in which I am appalled by WMF practice and policy. DGG, an administrator and arbitrator, has come to place heavy emphasis on conflict-of-interest editing as a threat to the project, and his fourth question this year serves as a litmus test on anonymity. I cannot support any candidate who said in response to DGG that they supported a relaxed policy toward outing for editors suspected of editing with dishonorable motives (even in acceptance of a supposed fait accompli). In particular, since the intractable cases that Arbcom exists to deal with are in many cases those where private circumstances or private evidence is involved, and since arbitrators additionally are checkusers and oversighters and who knows what-all they see, an attitude of differential respect for editors' privacy is absolutely out of place on Arbcom.
- Two concerns that have arisen this year are openness and whether non-admins should be members of the committee. For me those are subsumed within a single concern that I outlined in 2015, in hoping for reform: I want arbitrators who weigh the issues of these difficult cases in a fair and unbiased manner, not a manner based on precedent or respect for Arbcom as an institution, or a manner based on personal biases and friendships. While this willingness to think hard and fairly correlates highly with being someone I could support for adminship, such qualities are not found only among administrators. And the WMF is on record that it will accept election to Arbcom as a substitute for RfA in allowing access to deleted material, so it is not unfeasible for a non-admin to receive the necessary rights to do the job. It's kind of sad that this year we have so few candidates running that we may well get our first non-admin arbitrator(s) by default, for want of sufficient admin candidates. It would not be politic for me to comment on the growing numbers of admins desysopped by Arbcom. But while I am not altogether unhappy about the decline in the number of cases accepted by Arbcom in recent years, I don't share the opinion some have expressed that the committee is on the way to becoming irrelevant. We need to keep it around for intractable problems; and we don't need either to encourage the mindset that everything should be "solved" by the mob voting thumbs up or thumbs down at AN/I, or the fear that Arbcom is a Star Chamber to be avoided at all costs lest it muck things up even worse. But we need arbitrators with the wisdom to seek solutions short of a full case. And along those lines I note here that one candidate for reelection was excoriated on a criticism site that will remain unnamed for laying out their thought processes during Arbcom proceedings. To me, that's a plus.
I've decided not to list who I'll be voting for in this year's Arbcom election, and have also held off until almost the last minute. But here are considerations that weigh on my decision.
In 2015 I set out my personal reform agenda for Arbcom. Looking back now, my priorities have changed very little, so with some sadness that we have made only a start on fulfilling these aims, I'll quote it:
I am anxious for us to take the opportunity this year to reform ArbCom. I want it to become less of a law court, I want it to take fewer cases because more get solved before reaching that point, and I want people on the committee who think less in terms of precedent than in terms of finding solutions, and are not afraid to admit that they or a former ArbCom made a mistake. Above all I want the committee to hold above all else that piece of boilerplate that they vote up at the start of every remedy:
- The purpose of Wikipedia is to create a high-quality, free-content encyclopedia in an atmosphere of camaraderie and mutual respect among contributors.
This means that what I want in an Arbitrator is not unlike what I want in an administrator: sympathy for the wide variety of people in the community, mindfulness that writing and improving articles is our purpose here, clue and willingness to act on it including willingness to try a new solution, and fairness. I'll be settling for a group of candidates who collectively embody these ideals. What I do not want is: further hardening of ArbCom into a legal body that makes decisions based on its own precedents, further importation of politics into ArbCom decision making, favoritism based on friendships, or genuflection to the WMF, whose desires are orthogonal to the needs of the encyclopedia and the community, and who are not our bosses.
In 2015, I could not support former Arbcom members who voted to topic ban Eric Corbett from discussing the putative gender disparity on Wikipedia. Happily, that issue does not arise in 2017: Worm That Turned recused himself, no others are candidates. Three concerns remain:
- An issue about which I care deeply and that has remained unresolved is the conflict over differing interpretations of civility. The project depends on breadth as well as depth of participation: drawing on editors of every age and profession, with and without higher education, from every part of the globe and from every social class. What matters here is the shared mission of writing an encyclopedia, not one-upmanship or adherence to familiar social niceties. We alienate good potential editors if we allow the editing environment to be corroded by vindictiveness, snark, and combativeness. We also alienate good potential editors if we distil civility into a list of banned words. This is not a church picnic (as better editors than I have said); nor is it a debating contest; nor is it any one editor's familiar workplace, family dinner table, pub, classroom, or national prime-time TV. Gerda's question to the candidates shook loose some responses on this issue: I must oppose any candidate who equates "bad words" with incivility, even while recognizing that for editors from certain backgrounds—including some entire countries—an environment where "adult" language is not de facto "immature" is a shock. On the flip side, I would welcome candidates who explicitly say that they take a dim view of the combative approach to discussion, including sarcasm.
- Because the strength of the project is in the breadth as well as the depth of the editorship, and in no small measure also because we were promised anonymity when we signed up, I have always been a firm believer in the right to retain anonymity. In fact I hold this to be vital for female editors, among other specific classes of editors. This is one of several areas in which I am appalled by WMF practice and policy. DGG, an administrator and arbitrator, has come to place heavy emphasis on conflict-of-interest editing as a threat to the project, and his fourth question this year serves as a litmus test on anonymity. I cannot support any candidate who said in response to DGG that they supported a relaxed policy toward outing for editors suspected of editing with dishonorable motives (even in acceptance of a supposed fait accompli). In particular, since the intractable cases that Arbcom exists to deal with are in many cases those where private circumstances or private evidence is involved, and since arbitrators additionally are checkusers and oversighters and who knows what-all they see, an attitude of differential respect for editors' privacy is absolutely out of place on Arbcom.
- Two concerns that have arisen this year are openness and whether non-admins should be members of the committee. For me those are subsumed within a single concern that I outlined in 2015, in hoping for reform: I want arbitrators who weigh the issues of these difficult cases in a fair and unbiased manner, not a manner based on precedent or respect for Arbcom as an institution, or a manner based on personal biases and friendships. While this willingness to think hard and fairly correlates highly with being someone I could support for adminship, such qualities are not found only among administrators. And the WMF is on record that it will accept election to Arbcom as a substitute for RfA in allowing access to deleted material, so it is not unfeasible for a non-admin to receive the necessary rights to do the job. It's kind of sad that this year we have so few candidates running that we may well get our first non-admin arbitrator(s) by default, for want of sufficient admin candidates. It would not be politic for me to comment on the growing numbers of admins desysopped by Arbcom. But while I am not altogether unhappy about the decline in the number of cases accepted by Arbcom in recent years, I don't share the opinion some have expressed that the committee is on the way to becoming irrelevant. We need to keep it around for intractable problems; and we don't need either to encourage the mindset that everything should be "solved" by the mob voting thumbs up or thumbs down at AN/I, or the fear that Arbcom is a Star Chamber to be avoided at all costs lest it muck things up even worse. But we need arbitrators with the wisdom to seek solutions short of a full case. And along those lines I note here that one candidate for reelection was excoriated on a criticism site that will remain unnamed for laying out their thought processes during Arbcom proceedings. To me, that's a plus.