It seems to me that one of the big obstacles to participating in the AC would be the three-year commitment. Assuming I were qualified and interested in being on the AC, I would still hesitate because of the length of the term. It's hard enough for me to know what my life will be like next month, let alone three years from now. And I avoid making a commitment if I can't reasonably foresee fulfilling it. If nothing else, perhaps magistrates could have a shorter term of office? It also seems like there may be room for other types of official assistants for AC members. Someone to prepare briefs, for example. Just kind of brainstorming here... -Rich Holton __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. www.yahoo.com

-----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces(a)Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Delirium Sent: Friday, 12 November 2004 4:45 AM To: English Wikipedia Subject: [Norton AntiSpam] [WikiEN-l] the AC needs people with free time and interest After a year (?) or so on the arbitration committee, and not being particularly interested in staying on it, there's one main obstacle I've seen: A lack of people with sufficient free time and interest to wade through the often complicated disputes. It's not, in my opinion, problems in getting together a quorum, or even problems in discussing contentious disputes that are the primary stumbling block. It's just the lack of getting *anything* rolling at all. Often parties to disputes will dump literally hundreds of links to edit histories, and engage in lengthy multi-page accusations and counter-accusations. Someone has to sort through that and try to make sense of it. It's not a particularly interesting job, of course. Once someone does sort through it, and proposes something, the actual voting is comparatively unproblematic. There have been occasions when voting has been too slow, but that can be dealt with by e.g. leaving nagging messages on peoples' talk pages. The biggest and hardest to overcome delays are those where voting has simply never started, because nobody had the time or inclination to wade through the pile of evidence and accusations to distill a set of options to vote on in the first place. How to solve that I don't really know. -Mark _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l