[WikiEN-l] Arbcom

[William Pietri]

fredbaud at waterwiki.info wrote:
>> Say, Fred. Since you're a retired lawyer, are there any other approaches 
>> we might borrow from real-world court systems?
> Not off the top of my head, but how about making some suggestions? I find this train of thought productive.
>   

Sure thing.

I'm pretty ignorant of how courts actually work, so I'm sure there's 
more that we could mine. And I don't have a great idea of what the real 
burdens are for current AC members. But in the spirit of brainstorming, 
let me throw out some suggestions that I haven't really thought through:

    Law Clerks --  I understand that they do a lot of the donkey work:
    finding precedents, sifting through filings, and the like. I gather
    they sometimes can even write most of an opinion, although always
    under the direction of the judge. Could we find some similar way to
    get the arbitrators more help while leaving the ultimate power in
    the hands of the current arbitrators?

    Special Masters (1): The first time I heard of a special master was
    Larry Lessig's involvement in the Microsoft case. I understand his
    role was to investigate the technical issues on behalf of the court
    and come back with findings of fact. Could the ArbCom use a pool of
    researchers that would, say, investigate a person's edit history and
    come back with findings of act?

    Special Masters (2): Reading about them, I see that special masters
    are more typically appointed to enforce decisions. My hazy
    impression is that ArbCom's enforcement-related workload is pretty
    small, and that admins and editors mainly take care of that. But if
    not, perhaps we could steal something here.

    Appelate Courts: I think this has already been suggested, but the
    notion would be that we would have multiple general-purpose
    arbitration committees, with the current ArbCom taking more of a
    role like the US Supreme Court. The theory would be that dividing up
    the caseload would make all positions less demanding, and the
    two-tier system would allow mere mortals to serve on the lower
    courts with little reduction in outcome quality.

    Panels: Again, someone has suggested something similar, but I'm
    cribbing from the US Court of Appeals setup here. But perhaps when
    ArbCom is deciding to take a case, we now have three options:
    Reject, Panel, and En Banc. If everybody agrees it's a standard
    case, then a panel of three randomly assigned active arbitrators
    handles it. Otherwise, it is handled as now.

    Special-Purpose Courts: In the same way that there are juvenile
    courts, drug courts, and bankrupcty courts, I'm wondering if we
    could split up the workload. E.g., a editor-conflict court, an
    administrator-conduct court, an article-content court, a
    policies-and-procedures court. Or something. Presumably these would
    be under ArbCom with an appelate relationship, but they could be
    final courts as well.

    Limited-Scope Courts: I gather that small-claims courts have limited
    stakes and simplified procedures. Perhaps we could find something
    similar for common cases, like simple conduct disputes.

    Paying Judges: I don't know what the workload for ArbCom members is,
    but if it's causing burnout, I presume it's got to be substantial,
    especially alongside trying to make a living. In the Wikipedia
    context, it's probably a crazy idea, but I thought I'd point out
    that judges are paid, which has got to help reduce time conflicts.


As I said, these are just off-the-top-of-my head suggestions from a guy 
who doesn't know a ton about ArbCom or about real-world courts. But 
since courts face similar demands and issues, I figure they must have 
evolved a lot of time-tested solutions, and hopefully we could apply 
some of them here.

William




-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri