fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:

...

Say, Fred. Since you're a retired lawyer, are there any other approaches we might borrow from real-world court systems?

Not off the top of my head, but how about making some suggestions? I find this train of thought productive.

Sure thing.

I'm pretty ignorant of how courts actually work, so I'm sure there's more that we could mine. And I don't have a great idea of what the real burdens are for current AC members. But in the spirit of brainstorming, let me throw out some suggestions that I haven't really thought through:

Law Clerks -- I understand that they do a lot of the donkey work: finding precedents, sifting through filings, and the like. I gather they sometimes can even write most of an opinion, although always under the direction of the judge. Could we find some similar way to get the arbitrators more help while leaving the ultimate power in the hands of the current arbitrators?

Special Masters (1): The first time I heard of a special master was Larry Lessig's involvement in the Microsoft case. I understand his role was to investigate the technical issues on behalf of the court and come back with findings of fact. Could the ArbCom use a pool of researchers that would, say, investigate a person's edit history and come back with findings of act?

Special Masters (2): Reading about them, I see that special masters are more typically appointed to enforce decisions. My hazy impression is that ArbCom's enforcement-related workload is pretty small, and that admins and editors mainly take care of that. But if not, perhaps we could steal something here.

Appelate Courts: I think this has already been suggested, but the notion would be that we would have multiple general-purpose arbitration committees, with the current ArbCom taking more of a role like the US Supreme Court. The theory would be that dividing up the caseload would make all positions less demanding, and the two-tier system would allow mere mortals to serve on the lower courts with little reduction in outcome quality.

Panels: Again, someone has suggested something similar, but I'm cribbing from the US Court of Appeals setup here. But perhaps when ArbCom is deciding to take a case, we now have three options: Reject, Panel, and En Banc. If everybody agrees it's a standard case, then a panel of three randomly assigned active arbitrators handles it. Otherwise, it is handled as now.

Special-Purpose Courts: In the same way that there are juvenile courts, drug courts, and bankrupcty courts, I'm wondering if we could split up the workload. E.g., a editor-conflict court, an administrator-conduct court, an article-content court, a policies-and-procedures court. Or something. Presumably these would be under ArbCom with an appelate relationship, but they could be final courts as well.

Limited-Scope Courts: I gather that small-claims courts have limited stakes and simplified procedures. Perhaps we could find something similar for common cases, like simple conduct disputes.

Paying Judges: I don't know what the workload for ArbCom members is, but if it's causing burnout, I presume it's got to be substantial, especially alongside trying to make a living. In the Wikipedia context, it's probably a crazy idea, but I thought I'd point out that judges are paid, which has got to help reduce time conflicts.

As I said, these are just off-the-top-of-my head suggestions from a guy who doesn't know a ton about ArbCom or about real-world courts. But since courts face similar demands and issues, I figure they must have evolved a lot of time-tested solutions, and hopefully we could apply some of them here.

William