James D. Forrester wrote:
geni wrote:
On 11/12/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
There's an informal (formal?) rule that if a majority of arbitrators ever recuse on a case, they all are automatically unrecused. The justification is that, in all probability, a situation that
resulted in
a user having personal conflicts with nearly every single
arbitrator is
more likely to be the fault of the user than the fault individually of every arbitrator. A more practical justification is that it serves
as a
deterrent to trying to "win" a case by forcing everyone to recuse.
No. Last time we disscussed this the general conclusion was that we would call up past arbcom members and people from other languages if posible. The solution you list runs into the problem that if you have multiple sibjects to abitration it is posible for none of them to have gone overboard in disputes.
Erm. What on Earth do you mean, "no"? Mark was entirely correct - that is exactly the policy we came up with back in January 2004, when we wrote the policies in the first place.
That was the policy as it existed in its original draft form, but not the policy that was actually adopted. The provision for "unrecusing" already recused arbitrators was dropped from the policy based on my objections, see [[Wikipedia talk:Arbitration policy comments]]. I refuse to accept that this could be policy, formal or informal, since it's never been done in practice and was specifically objected to at the time.
The better approach is simply for arbitrators not to recuse themselves over trivial issues, or when they have merely been targeted by the editor in question. For these reasons, I support the refusal of Kelly Martin to recuse herself in the Silverback case. The conduct of the arbitrator, not the person whose conduct is being arbitrated, is what determines the necessity of recusal.
Geni is correct that in March there was some discussion of how to deal with arbitrator recusals. See this message I posted about the issue: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-March/020510.html My proposal received some acclaim, but I wouldn't say it was formally adopted, and in practice we've never had occasion to need it. I still think the "all arbitrators have to recuse themselves" scenario is pretty chimerical.
However, I maintain that we could benefit greatly from developing a group of temporary arbitrators, or magistrates, for the purpose of reducing the workload, filling in for recusals, and allowing cases to be handled by smaller panels. It would also get us out of the dilemma we currently have, between elections where we as a community make guesses about who's qualified and will actually do the work, or having Jimbo appoint everyone based on his own guesses and the advice of those he trusts.
--Michael Snow