[WikiEN-l] the AC needs people with free time and interest

[Delirium]

After a year (?) or so on the arbitration committee, and not being 
particularly interested in staying on it, there's one main obstacle I've 
seen: A lack of people with sufficient free time and interest to wade 
through the often complicated disputes.  It's not, in my opinion, 
problems in getting together a quorum, or even problems in discussing 
contentious disputes that are the primary stumbling block.  It's just 
the lack of getting *anything* rolling at all.

Often parties to disputes will dump literally hundreds of links to edit 
histories, and engage in lengthy multi-page accusations and 
counter-accusations.  Someone has to sort through that and try to make 
sense of it.  It's not a particularly interesting job, of course.

Once someone does sort through it, and proposes something, the actual 
voting is comparatively unproblematic.  There have been occasions when 
voting has been too slow, but that can be dealt with by e.g. leaving 
nagging messages on peoples' talk pages.  The biggest and hardest to 
overcome delays are those where voting has simply never started, because 
nobody had the time or inclination to wade through the pile of evidence 
and accusations to distill a set of options to vote on in the first 
place.  How to solve that I don't really know.

-Mark