From: "The Cunctator" cunctator@kband.com Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 08:06:24 -0500 To: wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org, wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] Arbitration/mediation on en
From: Jimmy Wales Friday, December 05, 2003 7:26 AM
<snip> > We have just begun a process on en of formalizing the decision > procedures for banning people, through the use of two committees of > volunteers. The first "line of defense" is a mediation committee, > which attempts to work with parties to find a mutually agreeable > solution to a problem. This committee has no power to ban or to do > anything other than act as an outside recommendation for a solution. > > The second "line of defense" is the arbitration committee, which will > be tasked with the difficult and painful and regrettable task of > banning someone from editing. > > This is mainly an experiment, and we shall see over time how it works > out. I hope it works well.
If it is to be an experiment, we should try to figure out beforehand what our metric of success is. Total success would be if neither committee ever needs to act. But the gradations in between are more complicated.
For example, which is better: if a high or low percentage of cases reviewed by the arbitration committee end in sanction or banning?
This must depend on the facts of the cases we get and the response of users to our decisions.
Which is better: if the arbitration committee agrees or disagrees with the mediators' actions?
We will know that mediation failed, but a useful legal convention, that we would probably wish to use, is that the details of negotiations and of what goes on in mediation are inadmissible as evidence in later proceedings. This frees up the parties to make concessions during negotiations and mediation without ruining their "case" for arbitration purposes.
That second relates to an important point: if a case is presented to the arbitration committee, what is being judged is not just the actions of the user(s) that resulted in mediation, but the entire process that led to arbitration, including what the mediators did.
We don't want to use this information because it makes mediation less effective. While the arbitration committee might from time to time comment on the total process and how it might have affected a particular case decisions regarding wikipedia process must remain here on the mailing lists and other discussion and decision making forums and Jimbo.
I think using bulletin boards for this is good, because I think it will be very important to establish a reviewable case history.
To review Jimbo needs to know what facts were considered and the basis for any decision.
The nearly immutable law of government is that while over the short term dangers to the health of society come from individual actors, over the long term the dangers come from the system.
It should be everyone's goal to figure out ways to eliminate potential problems before they can happen.
Before anyone can complain that someone has violated a policy that policy must both be set forth and make sense. Policies need to serve in some way the goals of delivering information and providing ways to add and refine information. However the arbitration committee is not a court of review of Wikipedia policies. We must work with existing policies. Breakdowns can occur if we can't understand them or how someone could comply with them, and perhaps in some cases we may be unable to render a decision, or at least a good decision.
A good real world example of that is drugs; because it is a criminal act to use illegal drugs, millions of dollars and manhours and lives are spent in combatting drug use (the "war on drugs"). But if the drugs (such as marijuana) are decriminalized, a host of downstream costs to society disappear. There *are* different complications and needs (tobacco is a good example of the potential problems of having drugs be legal to use) but it's a lot easier to deal with drugs as a health issue than a crime issue.
Well substitute persistant insistence on making articles reflect some particular point of view (including repeated reversions of any other point of view) and we have what kind of an issue? (although perhaps this is not actually our most important problem--experience will tell much)
Yours, --tc
Fred