On 10/16/07, wikien-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wikien-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com To: "'English Wikipedia'" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:30:49 +0100 Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Arbcom Thoughts...

Some of the things holding this problem in place seem to center around:

1. "Firefighting" mentality

Agreed wholeheartedly, which is similar to what I had mentioned earlier in the thread, in that is there any way to minimize the procedural bureaucracy that seems to weigh these cases down.

Another possibility would be a time window on formal evidence submission (everyone has 10 days to submit). If someone party to a case does something egregious after this point, a link to a diff should be sufficient.

Lastly, having a larger pool; requiring a smaller quorum; or both would also help prevent burnout in this regard by allowing for more downtime between crises.

2. High expectations by the community

Yes, but as court of final appeal, this expectation is warranted and justified. It may help if there was more education for the community to understand just how difficult and time consuming this process is, and, as mentioned before, everyone should keep in mind that if it were _their_ wiki-account on the block, wouldn't they want the benefit of the most detailed and deliberate analysis?

3. Lack of communal coherence

I agree, this is one of Arbcom's chief advantages, and why the expectations are so high, the need for trust so great, and the election process the most difficult. This is also why allowing admins to become mini-arbcom's is not a good idea, in my opinion.

4. Mixed sense amongst administrators what exactly the community has

delegated them to do.

This is a serious issue, and I agree with you that clarification would be helped. Arbcom, in its past desysoppings, has not, and should not, be bound by precedent as every case is individual and unique. However, that does mean that there are times when the administrators become paralyzed by indecision. If there was a clearer mandate for admins (regardless as to whether it would be more or less restrictive than now), that would somewhat mitigate the problem.

Now we have the situation where some admins will take anything with the possibility of an appearance of impropriety to WP:ANI or WP:AN, which although it has the best chance of preventing wheel-wars, edit wars, and divisiveness, also makes the process glacially slow and prone to stalemate. Other admins will only be seen on WP:ANI when there is enough outcry as to their unilateral applications of deletes and blocks.

Something in the middle would be the most efficient, I believe.

</thoughts>

FT2.

--Avi