Delirium wrote:

... Perhaps it's a personal opinion, but I think we ought to strive to be as open and accomodating as possible, and avoid banning as much as possible, since that's basically a "we give up, this person cannot work within Wikipedia" decision. ...

I hope this will become the general ethos of the dispute resolution process. If not, then, IMO, we would have failed. However, arbitration is on the tail end of that process so I imagine that a fair number of arbitration cases will result in some type of editing sanction period (such as slowdowns, not able to edit certain articles or kinds of articles, not able to edit in a certain namespace(s), not being able to edit at all for a short term, and not being able to edit at all for a long term).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)