I posted this question at the Village Pump last night,
but it hasn't got much response (perhaps because most
everyone was asleep at the time I wrote it).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#How_many_A…
The crux of my point is that the number of active
editors in Wikipedia has grown nearly 10 fold since
ArbCom was created 2 years ago, while the number of
Arbitrators has remained constant at 12.
Perhaps this just means we should expand the pool of
Arbitrators and elect 20 or 30 this time around as
some people had proposed (though one might have
trouble finding enough people to run).
As an alternative, I suggested moving to a system more
like Admins / Bureaucrats where we continually approve
trusted members of the community to serve in this role
and allow the pool to grow as needed to keep up with
Wikipedia's growth. A pool of 50-100 trusted
community members, working in groups of 10-15, could
make short work of the backlog generally seen at
RFArb.
-DF