Hi James, I'd like to respond your point about procedure. Just as we in the United States refer difficult court cases to the Supreme Court and not to the electorate, it seems to me that there is good reason to refer difficult conduct cases to a deliberative body, which in the case of English Wikipedia is Arbcom, and not the entire community. However, the community gets to have a say indirectly by electing the Arbcom members. It seems to me that this is a much saner approach than asking everyone in the community to spend hours of their time reading page after page of evidence. Also, there can be good reason for maintaining confidentiality of certain kinds of evidence, and this kind of confidentiality would be difficult or impossible if conduct cases were referred to the entire community. Matters of broad policy may be referred by Arbcom to the community or may be taken up by the community directly, but it seems to me that specific conduct cases are best handled by an Arbcom-like deliberative body. Pine Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:15:08 -1200 From: James Heilman <jmh649(a)gmail.com> To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Foundation-l] Will Beback Message-ID: <CAF1en7UEORmvF6Du7Lkvi07LetgYGpyBd6nJCsubigerPHer2g(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 We appear to have a problem with Arbcom. We have an editor who has contributed significantly to Wikipedia over the previous 7 years, making more than 100,000 edits and generating a couple of featured articles. Than in a vote of 8 to 4 he is block indefinitely for issues related to a specific religious movement. The foundation is spending large sums in an attempt to attract productive editors to the project. Arbcoms actions seem counterproductive to these efforts. Is it time that we look at rearranging how arbcom works? Issues that have a significant effect on Wikipedia should not be left to a group of 12 but should go to the community for consensus. -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian