[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 8:48 AM, Christiano Moreschi
> <moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> >  I take it you object to the fact that "They give a lot of leeway to
> long term trolls yet they do
> >  not give a fraction of that to good standing users." Now, I agree, and
> they should start banning
> >  long-term trolls. Who, I wonder, would be first up against the wall
> were that to happen?
>
> I suspect quite a lot of users would agree that we should take a
> harder line on some people; however, I'm not sure that there is wide
> agreement on WHICH people. One person's troll is another person's
> unfairly maligned good user, I find.
>
> Arbcom suffers from the well-known and far from unique problems of
> committees (slow to decide, cautious).  However, being quick and rash
> isn't necessarily the right thing either.
>

There's a dynamic tension between individual admins, the "community
consensus" as a whole, the admin community consensus, and Arbcom (and,
sometimes, OTRS or the Office or senior staff, but usually not).

These all have different roles that are played.

It's REALLY REALLY GOOD to have checks and balances, more proactive aspects
and more deliberative aspects to the overall governance scheme.  Of all the
online projects I am aware of, this is not only the largest in terms of
active participation, but also the best governed in the sense of
structurally having adapted relatively rapidly when serious problems show
up.

That is not to say that there isn't room for improvement.  But a lot of what
Arbcom does is a feature, not a bug.  Even if it bugs people sometimes.

There was a time when admins individually or collectively imposed "a pox on
both your houses" more often in disputes.  There was a time when admins
tended to take a side in a dispute in a more unipolar manner and other
parties would get a short shift, even on legitimate concerns.  There's less
of that happening now outside glaringly obvious abuse cases, which has
slowed down arbitrary admin and admin community consensus responses.

That doesn't mean Arbcom should wield a swifter or harder hammer.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com