[Foundation-l] Will Beback (responding to James)

[En Pine]

Hi James,

I'd like to respond your point about procedure.

Just as we in the United States refer difficult court cases to the Supreme 
Court and not to the electorate, it seems to me that there is good reason to 
refer difficult conduct cases to a deliberative body, which in the case of 
English Wikipedia is Arbcom, and not the entire community. However, the 
community gets to have a say indirectly by electing the Arbcom members. It 
seems to me that this is a much saner approach than asking everyone in the 
community to spend hours of their time reading page after page of evidence. 
Also, there can be good reason for maintaining confidentiality of certain 
kinds of evidence, and this kind of confidentiality would be difficult or 
impossible if conduct cases were referred to the entire community.

Matters of broad policy may be referred by Arbcom to the community or may be 
taken up by the community directly, but it seems to me that specific conduct 
cases are best handled by an Arbcom-like deliberative body.

Pine


Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:15:08 -1200
From: James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com>
To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: [Foundation-l] Will Beback
Message-ID:
<CAF1en7UEORmvF6Du7Lkvi07LetgYGpyBd6nJCsubigerPHer2g at mail.gmail.com>
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We appear to have a problem with Arbcom. We have an editor who has
contributed significantly to Wikipedia over the previous 7 years, making
more than 100,000 edits and generating a couple of featured articles. Than
in a vote of 8 to 4 he is block indefinitely for issues related to a
specific religious movement.

The foundation is spending large sums in an attempt to attract productive
editors to the project. Arbcoms actions seem counterproductive to these
efforts. Is it time that we look at rearranging how arbcom works? Issues
that have a significant effect on Wikipedia should not be left to a group
of 12 but should go to the community for consensus.

-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian