[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors} - repost

[Fred Bauder]

> We need an effective way to sanction any member of the community that
> is disruptive or incivil. We need ArbCom to become more of an
> appellate than the sole "court" of English Wikipedia, because they
> can't scale to that, and because they are specifically tasked with the
> worst problems, not with the "death by a thousand cuts" of borderline
> disruption. A start would be some form of binding dispute resolution
> that doesn't require ArbCom involvement, but it has to be binding, and
> it has to be able to consistently result in sanctions if the dispute
> resolution process fails - without the case having to go before ArbCom
> first.

> As far as fixing dispute resolution, I suggest that a first measure,
> we restore and revamp the mediation system and make it binding. The
> way this would work, mediators would begin to be elected or appointed
> to reach a suitable number of mediators for the expected caseload.
> Mediators would be assigned to cases requesting mediation, under the
> condition that prior dispute resolution steps must have been attempted
> - or that only one of the parties were willing to participate in
> dispute resolution. Once a case was reviewed and accepted, it would
> enter a binding mediation.
> Editors participating in binding mediations would reach a solution
> mutually agreeable to the parties and found reasonable (by the
> standards of policy and practical enforceability)  by the mediators,
> or the failure to do so would be submitted to arbcom along with the
> prior chain of dispute resolution activity and could potentially form
> further evidence of tenditiousness and incivility. Agreements reached
> from mediation would be binding on the parties, in that the standard
> remedies of "any uninvolved administrator" being able to enforce an
> agreement would apply, and such agreements would stand until
> renegotiated or appealed to ArbCom. Finally, mediators would be given
> access to an expedited ArbCom process (essentially, the ability to ask
> ArbCom for an injunction in a case that has not yet been presented to
> them)  for obtaining injunctions in order to stop a disputed activity
> while negotiations take place - injunctions of this nature would
> expire after reaching an agreement through mediation, or after
> reaching a decision through arbitration.
>
> -Stephanie

You're proposing a rather complex structure when we are having trouble
finding responsible talented people to populate the limited one we have.

I think we need to go the other direction, empowering administrators, a
movement that is ongoing. However along with more widespread power there
needs to be more widespread skill and finesse.

I keep coming back to community practices; they need to advance on a
broad basis. Everybody needs to do better and have an understanding of
how their behavior affects the entire project. That, I guess, is called
socialization.

How are Wikipedia editors socialized?

Fred