We need an effective way to sanction any member of the
community that
is disruptive or incivil. We need ArbCom to become more of an
appellate than the sole "court" of English Wikipedia, because they
can't scale to that, and because they are specifically tasked with the
worst problems, not with the "death by a thousand cuts" of borderline
disruption. A start would be some form of binding dispute resolution
that doesn't require ArbCom involvement, but it has to be binding, and
it has to be able to consistently result in sanctions if the dispute
resolution process fails - without the case having to go before ArbCom
first.
As far as fixing dispute resolution, I suggest that a
first measure,
we restore and revamp the mediation system and make it binding. The
way this would work, mediators would begin to be elected or appointed
to reach a suitable number of mediators for the expected caseload.
Mediators would be assigned to cases requesting mediation, under the
condition that prior dispute resolution steps must have been attempted
- or that only one of the parties were willing to participate in
dispute resolution. Once a case was reviewed and accepted, it would
enter a binding mediation.
Editors participating in binding mediations would reach a solution
mutually agreeable to the parties and found reasonable (by the
standards of policy and practical enforceability) by the mediators,
or the failure to do so would be submitted to arbcom along with the
prior chain of dispute resolution activity and could potentially form
further evidence of tenditiousness and incivility. Agreements reached
from mediation would be binding on the parties, in that the standard
remedies of "any uninvolved administrator" being able to enforce an
agreement would apply, and such agreements would stand until
renegotiated or appealed to ArbCom. Finally, mediators would be given
access to an expedited ArbCom process (essentially, the ability to ask
ArbCom for an injunction in a case that has not yet been presented to
them) for obtaining injunctions in order to stop a disputed activity
while negotiations take place - injunctions of this nature would
expire after reaching an agreement through mediation, or after
reaching a decision through arbitration.
-Stephanie
You're proposing a rather complex structure when we are having trouble
finding responsible talented people to populate the limited one we have.
I think we need to go the other direction, empowering administrators, a
movement that is ongoing. However along with more widespread power there
needs to be more widespread skill and finesse.
I keep coming back to community practices; they need to advance on a
broad basis. Everybody needs to do better and have an understanding of
how their behavior affects the entire project. That, I guess, is called
socialization.
How are Wikipedia editors socialized?
Fred