Mav and I had a chat today on IRC about the arbitration committee, and we came to a somewhat different and more aggressive model to the one Michael Snow is proposing.
I can take very little credit for this, since our discussion basically consisted of me putting forward my ideas, Mav saying his were better, and me agreeing.
The basic problem, as I think we all understand, is that the Arbitration Committee is slow. It is slow because some of the members don't reply to emails and don't watch the relevant pages on the wiki. What emails they do send are few and far between.
The first and most important measure to improve the speed of the AC is to reduce the necessary quorum to three members. Decisions are made by a simple majority. Any member of the arbitration committee may request a review of such decisions by the full committee.
The second is that deliberation should be conducted by IRC, not email. Cases will still be accepted on the wiki, and findings will still be announced on the wiki. But deliberations will be performed by any and all AC members present in #arbcom.wikipedia, as long as there is more than three of them.
Under this proposal, the size of the arbitration committee can expand to meet the ever-increasing demands placed on them. Preliminary judgements leading to blocking pending a full review should be possible within minutes of a request.
I'll put up this proposal on the wiki some time in the next couple of days, unless someone else beats me to it.
-- Tim Starling
I think is an excellent idea: kudos to you both.
The two things that I'd been keen to know first, however, are - would this involve a reduction in the number of arbitrators, as in Michael's proposal, and also - how many of the current group of arbitrators are active on IRC? I know James is (provided he plans to run for re-election - I hope so) and also Mav, but I'm a bit concerned that some people who've played a fairly crucial role this far - Fred Bauder, for one, may not use IRC.
That said, I think this would go a long way towards the bottleneck at the heart of all of this.
-- ambi
On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 19:30:04 +1100, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Mav and I had a chat today on IRC about the arbitration committee, and we came to a somewhat different and more aggressive model to the one Michael Snow is proposing.
I can take very little credit for this, since our discussion basically consisted of me putting forward my ideas, Mav saying his were better, and me agreeing.
The basic problem, as I think we all understand, is that the Arbitration Committee is slow. It is slow because some of the members don't reply to emails and don't watch the relevant pages on the wiki. What emails they do send are few and far between.
The first and most important measure to improve the speed of the AC is to reduce the necessary quorum to three members. Decisions are made by a simple majority. Any member of the arbitration committee may request a review of such decisions by the full committee.
The second is that deliberation should be conducted by IRC, not email. Cases will still be accepted on the wiki, and findings will still be announced on the wiki. But deliberations will be performed by any and all AC members present in #arbcom.wikipedia, as long as there is more than three of them.
Under this proposal, the size of the arbitration committee can expand to meet the ever-increasing demands placed on them. Preliminary judgements leading to blocking pending a full review should be possible within minutes of a request.
I'll put up this proposal on the wiki some time in the next couple of days, unless someone else beats me to it.
-- Tim Starling
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I don't use it but can access it.
Fred
From: Rebecca misfitgirl@gmail.com Reply-To: Rebecca misfitgirl@gmail.com, English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 21:59:38 +1100 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] AC with a small quorum and IRC meetings
I think is an excellent idea: kudos to you both.
The two things that I'd been keen to know first, however, are - would this involve a reduction in the number of arbitrators, as in Michael's proposal, and also - how many of the current group of arbitrators are active on IRC? I know James is (provided he plans to run for re-election - I hope so) and also Mav, but I'm a bit concerned that some people who've played a fairly crucial role this far - Fred Bauder, for one, may not use IRC.
That said, I think this would go a long way towards the bottleneck at the heart of all of this.
-- ambi
On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 19:30:04 +1100, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Mav and I had a chat today on IRC about the arbitration committee, and we came to a somewhat different and more aggressive model to the one Michael Snow is proposing.
I can take very little credit for this, since our discussion basically consisted of me putting forward my ideas, Mav saying his were better, and me agreeing.
The basic problem, as I think we all understand, is that the Arbitration Committee is slow. It is slow because some of the members don't reply to emails and don't watch the relevant pages on the wiki. What emails they do send are few and far between.
The first and most important measure to improve the speed of the AC is to reduce the necessary quorum to three members. Decisions are made by a simple majority. Any member of the arbitration committee may request a review of such decisions by the full committee.
The second is that deliberation should be conducted by IRC, not email. Cases will still be accepted on the wiki, and findings will still be announced on the wiki. But deliberations will be performed by any and all AC members present in #arbcom.wikipedia, as long as there is more than three of them.
Under this proposal, the size of the arbitration committee can expand to meet the ever-increasing demands placed on them. Preliminary judgements leading to blocking pending a full review should be possible within minutes of a request.
I'll put up this proposal on the wiki some time in the next couple of days, unless someone else beats me to it.
-- Tim Starling
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Rebecca wrote:
I think is an excellent idea: kudos to you both.
The two things that I'd been keen to know first, however, are - would this involve a reduction in the number of arbitrators, as in Michael's proposal,
No. The number of arbitrators could well be increased. Michael wanted to reduce the number of arbitrators to reduce the number of people required for a decision, our proposal is to reduce that number more directly, while retaining a low workload on each arbitrator and keeping a wide variety of views on the committee.
and also - how many of the current group of arbitrators are active on IRC? I know James is (provided he plans to run for re-election - I hope so) and also Mav, but I'm a bit concerned that some people who've played a fairly crucial role this far - Fred Bauder, for one, may not use IRC.
Not all of them use IRC. We can provide technical support to help arbitrators install a client on their computer. We could also set up a CGI:IRC gateway, or make a proxy available, if it proves to be necessary. The idea of setting up a CGI:IRC gateway for all the Wikipedia channels has been suggested before, we could probably just do that, if we have the hardware resources.
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling (t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au) [041111 22:05]:
Not all of them use IRC. We can provide technical support to help arbitrators install a client on their computer. We could also set up a CGI:IRC gateway, or make a proxy available, if it proves to be necessary. The idea of setting up a CGI:IRC gateway for all the Wikipedia channels has been suggested before, we could probably just do that, if we have the hardware resources.
CGI:IRC is awkward to use, though, and may be offputting. Is there a free software Java applet similar to (non-free) jIRC (from jpilot.com)? jIRC is pretty usable in my experience. (Presumably we can find one that works under Kaffe, to keep the free software purity ;-)
- d.
-----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of David Gerard Sent: Friday, 12 November 2004 2:05 AM To: English Wikipedia Subject: [Norton AntiSpam] Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: AC with a small quorum and IRC meetings
Tim Starling (t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au) [041111 22:05]:
Not all of them use IRC. We can provide technical support to help arbitrators install a client on their computer. We could also set up a
CGI:IRC gateway, or make a proxy available, if it proves to be necessary. The idea of setting up a CGI:IRC gateway for all the Wikipedia channels has been suggested before, we could probably just
do
that, if we have the hardware resources.
CGI:IRC is awkward to use, though, and may be offputting. Is there a free software Java applet similar to (non-free) jIRC (from jpilot.com)? jIRC is pretty usable in my experience. (Presumably we can find one that works under Kaffe, to keep the free software purity ;-)
- d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Tim Starling wrote:
The first and most important measure to improve the speed of the AC is to reduce the necessary quorum to three members. Decisions are made by a simple majority. Any member of the arbitration committee may request a review of such decisions by the full committee.
The second is that deliberation should be conducted by IRC, not email. Cases will still be accepted on the wiki, and findings will still be announced on the wiki. But deliberations will be performed by any and all AC members present in #arbcom.wikipedia, as long as there is more than three of them.
Under this proposal, the size of the arbitration committee can expand to meet the ever-increasing demands placed on them. Preliminary judgements leading to blocking pending a full review should be possible within minutes of a request.
I think this would really help. I think I'd like to see it as an option rather than the only possibility though. The benefit to the users in question would be a quick decision; the problem would be that it would be likely to be a less in depth investigation. It would perhaps be a gamble to some extent, but one that I think many users would take to speed up the process.
I think there might be ways of adding to this, perhaps with a provision for an "appeal" - which might involve more arbitrators and be more in the style of arbitration available now. Although there would also have to be precautions to ensure this doesn't mean that every decision simply goes back to the long form.
One thing about this proposal is that a large committee would be helpful in this case, allowing a pool of arbitrators to be available at various times.
I'm intending to stand for a position on the arbitration committee this time round - so would be very interested to read more on this proposal when it's written.
--sannse
Tim Starling wrote:
The first and most important measure to improve the speed of the AC is to reduce the necessary quorum to three members. Decisions are made by a simple majority. Any member of the arbitration committee may request a review of such decisions by the full committee.
The second is that deliberation should be conducted by IRC, not email. Cases will still be accepted on the wiki, and findings will still be announced on the wiki. But deliberations will be performed by any and all AC members present in #arbcom.wikipedia, as long as there is more than three of them.
I agree that the first is a useful change, since getting the full committee together in a timely manner with peoples' schedules seems like it will remain nearly impossible no matter what combination of people are on it. I'm not sure the second one is necessary though: The primary problem right now is that there are few arbitrators with lots of free time, and few non-arbitrators with lots of free time who have expressed an interest in becoming arbitrators. If we had at least a few arbitrators with a lot of free time, I'm not sure email would be insufficient, and if we don't have arbitrators with free time, nobody will use IRC any more than they use email.
-Mark