Quoting George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com:
On 10/15/07, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
On 16/10/2007, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
The downside of this is that taken to an extreme, it effectively *requires* that participants get an experienced advocate to help with the process and motions, which introduces the role that Attorneys play in real life. And we're a volunteer organization, so we can't make someone stand up and argue for someone else's defense.
The other downside is that this was tried - the Association of Members' Advocates, because people who ended up in arbitration tended to be those who rubbed others up the wrong way and did a really bad job of representing themselves in the first place. The ArbCom welcomed the idea as potentially helpful ... then *all* the AMA did was wikilawyer and try procedural tricks, rather than actually help translate their clients' positions and thoughts into something that appeared reasonable and comprehensible. They were literally worse than useless. I remember having frequently thought "could you please shut up and stop dragging your client down." Eegh.
There were a variety of problems with the AMA. 1) Many of the advocates were the self-righteous sort who enjoy wikilawyering 2) Many others were people who while not clueless were close to it 3) Many of the people who go in front of the ArbCom don't have a better argument to make that can be reasonably translated. This third problem seemed to be the most common and serious problem. If translating their clients positions are going to definitely get their clients banned, or if their clients positions are impossible to translate into any coherent thoughts, the AMA members didn't have many options other than to wikilawyer.
This is related to the fact that the vast majority of people who get hard sanctions from the ArbCom do in fact deserve the hard sanctions, in at least the minimal sense that the project will be better off with the editors sanctioned.
Sounds like they (the AMA members) didn't quite grasp the concept of "plea bargain" ...
The real issue in many ways was that AMA members had divided loyalty, some to their clients and some to the project. An AMA member couldn't say something like "After talking to my client, I'm now convinced that my client will not understand NPOV and even if my client did understand he would ignore it". Furthermore, no form of plea bargain works well at that point. The people who go in front of the ArbCom who got AMA members were often people who would have had little or no interest in anything other than being in charge or at least have their POV in charge. No amount of AMA representation would have changed that.