Howdy hello folks! After sailing as an Arbitrator for the past two years, I am again looking to volunteer my time and energy to serve aboard the good ship ArbCom. During my term, I was the drafting Arb on two cases. I oversaw DS reform alongside L235 and Wugapodes this year, and I'm proud to say that it is up for vote. I continue to focus on ideas for reforming ArbCom's processes, and making the Committee as efficient and effective as possible.
Much of ArbCom's work happens behind the scenes. I was active on nearly a thousand ArbCom email threads, and sent well over a thousand emails advancing the Committee's work over my term. I believe in fairness, sensitivity, and minimizing bureaucracy when it comes to the Committee's private workload.
The minority of ArbCom's work is in cases, but they are certainly the Committee's most dramatic element. Cases should be as short as possible, and as drama free as possible. Cases should also be open to unusual and creative solutions. We must understand that the editors who come before us are people too. I strive to avoid simply voting along group lines.
I believe in transparency, and advocating for the Community. In the last two years, I am proud to have attended almost all of ArbCom's monthly meetings with WMF staff, each time being a voice for the Community's interests. I will vigorously push for the Community at every turn. I think this will be extremely important in the next few years as UCOC enforcement takes shape. I oppose a "global ArbCom", which would undermine local governance.
When I am not Arbing, I love writing about birds and history. I have two FA's to my name, as well as a variety of other accolades. During my term, I'm most proud to have taken Gallic WarstoGA.
Ultimately, I am running because I deeply believe in Wikipedia's mission to present the sum of all human knowledge. I think the best way to achieve that is to have a harmonious and welcoming community. Without our editors, we are nothing. We must focus on not only retaining, but also recruiting editors, and the decisions that ArbCom makes have an outsized impact on that. I am honored to have been on the Committee. I hope that you will again empower me to serve as your representative. Smooth sailing.
Disclosure: I have one alt account: AdmiralEek. I meet the WMF's criteria for access to non-public data and have already signed the various NDA's.
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There is a limit of two questions per editor for each candidate. You may also ask a reasonable number of follow-up questions relevant to questions you have already asked.
An editor is involved when they are incapable of making objective decisions due to having been party to a dispute. The conflict could be over content, it could be over personality. The editor in question may feel there is no conflict, but the mere fact that they have been involved in the dispute is likely to to muddy their thinking. Of course, purely administrative actions don't make a person involved. Nor do straightforward actions breach involved. This last point has been contentious. Some have argued that if any admin could have done it, why was it necessary for the involved admin to do it? I think this interpretation would render the straightforward action exemption redundant. Just because any other admin could have done it does not mean that another admin would have acted timely.
Regarding the Athaenara case, I voted that TNT was involved. They were Isabelle's nominator. Athaenara insulted Isabelle. TNT then checked Athaenara. The bond between nominator and nominee, in my experience, is very tight. That is pretty clear involvement to me. And TNT then made a foolish decision, which shows why we have the involved policy.
Regarding the Manning case, I question its precedential value. The case is now 9 years old, and on a dubious topic. How we deal with trans subjects has fundamentally changed in the years since. I think the outcome, to restrict David Gerard's tool use rather than desysop him, was inventive, and I think we should have more such creative remedies.
Climate is an even older case, at 12 years. I note that Lar was investigated for being involved, and had findings of fact regarding him, but the Committee failed to offer a remedy. Today, I imagine I'd at least vote for a warning or admonishment.
All in all, involvement is a question that has reared its head repeatedly in recent years, and I have no doubt we will continue to see such problems.CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 17:46, 23 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The future is uncertain, and that concerns me. My fear is that the Coordinating Committee will become some sort of global ArbCom. The reason that ArbCom works is because the buck stops with it. There is no higher level of appeal. While I don't want our processes to be court-like, ArbCom is much like a real world supreme court. Its decisions are final, which provides certainty to the community. But if suddenly ArbCom decisions would be appealable to the Coordinating Committee, we would lose significant local independence. We would be instead like a mid-level appellate court, subject to overturn by a Coordinating Committee with different values and understandings than EnWiki. I understand the need for the UCOC. But on projects where we are already effectively self governing, we don't need a seperate body for UCOC enforcement. We already have multiple possible UCOC enforcement venues: ArbCom, the administrators, the community. We self govern everyday, we can self govern the UCOC too.
Now, section 3.1.1 of of the revised enforcement guidelines is promising: it seems to provide a focus for local governance. But 3.1.2 notes that "systematic failure to follow the UCoC" would be handled by the U4C. That is what worries me the most. It is ill defined. If an editor runs to U4C and claims that ArbCom is ignoring their claims, is that a systematic failure? Or instead do there need to be repeated cases? How easy will it be for a crafty troll to evade ArbCom and suck up the time of both ArbCom and U4C?
Aside from that, I believe that we as a community need to have a frank internal discussion of how to handle the UCOC. I envision that much UCOC enforcement will be vested in the admins at AN/ANI. What they can't handle, ArbCom will. But ultimately, that is not up to me: it is up to the community. I think we'll need some brainstorming, and then an RfC, to determine whether we need new workflows, or if existing workflows are sufficient. Unless the community desires ArbCom to take on the responsibility, I would be inclined to leave most UCOC enforcement to the community, as we do with our existing practices. Regardless, I think the UCOC will be one of the big issues in the next few years, and I promise to champion the EnWiki community at every turn. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 18:38, 23 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I've always pronounced it "A-N-I". I always imagine the idea of someone being "hauled to ANI" (and perhaps being "keelhauled" at ANI should things go poorly for them...). CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 18:38, 23 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Not all transgressions demand the same punishment. I agree that TNT made a foolish decision, and was INVOLVED. But I do not agree that the solution was to remove their CU rights. TNT expressed regret and apology. I just do not think the issue would have come up again. I respect the rest of the Committee, and understand that we disagreed. But I just don't see how removing TNT's permissions over a rather unique and stressful situation for which they had apologized and expressed understanding was productive.
Beyond that, editors may read my vote at the case page CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 17:45, 23 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'll in part copy my answer from 2020: "I don't think the struggles about infoboxes are truly over. But I do think the fierce and vitriolic "infobox wars" are over. Infoboxes are here to stay, and editors have been using civil discussion to solve infobox issues for some years. It has been more than seven years since that case, and the case was only revisited in 2015 to loosen some editing restrictions."
To that, I'll add that I don't think ArbCom is the body best suited to solve the problem for the most part. I was party to a few infobox disputes over the last couple of years, notably at American Civil War, which is one of my most edited articles. We had a long running dispute about when the Civil War ended, and since the date is disputed, what to put in the infobox. It was contentious at times, but the regular editing processes of dispute resoloution, RfCs, and not edit warring, led to an accepted consensus. Perhaps there are more rancorous infobox conversations happening, but I am not aware of them. Short of the return of the full scale infobox wars, I just don't see what more ArbCom could or should do. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 17:46, 23 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
From a content perspective, no comment. It is not an Arb's job to determine whether the outcome was "right". From a behavior standpoint, it certainly got a little spicy at times, but I think the normal processes of Wikipedia won out. An RfC was held, it had lots of commenters, discussion was mostly controlled, and there was a thoughtful and considered close. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 23:56, 28 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Only if there was no EnWiki policy on point, and if it was necessary to ensure EnWiki independence (i.e. prevent the issue from escalating to the U4C). CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 16:09, 24 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm unsure what you mean by investigate. The Committee expects evidence to be more than just accusations: there must be diffs, screenshots, emails, and so on. So yes, the Committee must go further than just accusations. But I imagine your question means must the Committee go beyond what the diffs and so forth that it has been presented. I.e., must the Arbs do their own independent investigation? I think there is no such duty, but that Arbs may do so if they wish. The Committee relies on the fact finding abilities of the community and parties. The commenters and parties, being closer to the dispute, generally have a better feel for what is relevant. But that doesn't mean the Committee can never do its own looking. The Committee frequently does its own checkusering in certain issues, and Arbs have occasionally found pieces of evidence that others have not. Requiring or forbidding Arbs from doing independent investigation would be foolish: we are in a happy middle ground that works. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 22:36, 26 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
No. Sometimes the Committee must deal with its own. Take Alex Shih as the prototypical example. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 22:36, 26 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. Your answers are perfectly satisfactory, expecially Q2. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:53, 27 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Its fun! I edit Wikipedia as a hobby, and I do it because I enjoy it. It feels good to be providing free knowledge that can be used around the world. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 23:37, 28 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
For starters, I'm not sure we're yet done with DS. This year's reforms were a lot of fixes, but I've chatted with Kevin and I think that more could be done with DS reform. Such changes would probably be pretty major though, so need some careful consideration.
Beyond DS reform, I want to focus on our backend. ArbCom receives a truly legendary amount of emails every year, and its easy for things to get lost or fall by the wayside. There was some discussion this year about getting the WMF to maybe buy/provide to us some actually decent email management software (our current software is...not great). We kind of hit a wall with that, but I'd like to put some more energy into it, because having better software would make a difference. I really want to focus on ways to make the Committee more responsive privately, and to keep our workload streamlined.
In that vein, there was also discussion about devolving most CU appeals to the CU's themselves. That would require some considerable community discussion first, but I'm open to exploring the idea. More than 80% of the appeals we get are just such obvious declines or trolls that it shouldn't take so much Arb time to rubberstamp declines on them. Perhaps even just changing some internal procedures might work to fix that. As a single Arb, I can't pretend to have the entire solution: its a collaborative process and I'd look forward to working with the other Arbs to make the Committee more effective. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 23:50, 28 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I had not previously read them, but I have just done so. First, both of them are essays, and thus not policy. Second, I'm not certain what this has to do with Arb elections. It really feels like a content question: whether to include or not include something in an article. ArbCom is not in the content business. Nor for that matter is it generally in the content policy business. ArbCom focuses on editor behavior, and while it may require that editors hold true to NPOV, I somewhat doubt that it would ever hear an issue about an editor's good faith, non-disruptive interpretation of policy. If say a user was favoring MANDY or NOTMANDY disruptively, the issue wouldn't be which one was right, but rather that the user was violating a behavioral standard. As is alluded to in Gerda Arendt's questions, the Committee has dealt with feuding sides of a policy issue before: the Infobox wars. The Committee didn't take a side, because that would have been wrong. Instead, the Committee sanctioned the most disruptive users, and made it clear the remaining users that they were being held to a high standard. If the Committee had to hear an issue around MANDY, I imagine the outcome would look very similar to Infoboxes: sanctions, but the Committee doesn't choose a side. That's how it should be: the Committee should never accept the temptation to declare a content winner, no matter how right they might seem.
With that said, personally, I think MANDY/NOTMANDY is a false dichotomy. We print what reliable sources say. Sometimes they'll mention denials, sometimes they won't. We should be following what they're doing, not trying to re-invent the wheel. If there is a question of DUE weight, the quality and extent of coverage must be examined. There isn't a rigid yes or no answer in all cases. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 06:53, 30 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
