On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On the other side, I would note that being a member of en.wp's ArbCom is highly stressful position and I don't think that there are many of long-term ArbCom members (in comparison to, let's say, WMF Board). I am sure that one of the most important reasons are negative votes, exactly. You can't do good job if you want to be reelected.
Newyorkbrad managed to serve for _eight years_, and most people seem to think he did a good job. It is true that most arbitrators don't serve for very long,[0] but this is mainly because they either resign or choose not to run again. The standard reasons are "it's too stressful" or "I'm too busy".
From what I remember, the usual panic around election time is that
there won't be enough candidates (of course, there always are).
There were elections for CheckUser and Oversight for a couple years, but ArbCom went back to just appointing people after there was an election in which only one person passed the vote threshold. CU/OS is more comparable to stewardship than to ArbCom, though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee/History#Former...