Neotarf wrote:The End wrote:Long ago when I was in the "Wikipedia can be reformed" camp, I had some ideas about reforming Arbcom to make it more effective. One idea was dividing the 15 arbitrators into groups of three with five arbs each or maybe groups of five with three arbs each. Each group would have their own private mailing lists separate from each other, while having access to the Arbcom wiki discussing the case. Groups would handle arbitration requests, appeals, and clarifications. Appeals would be handled by a group different from the one that created and executed the case....
This is about procedure and process and what makes for a "fair hearing". How do you set up a system with an "impartial decision maker"?
How can the arbitration committee review their own decisions? They are WP:INVOLVED. This is a huge conflict of interest.
The End wrote:Another idea that we discussed on the old Wikipedia Review was bringing in third-party professional mediators and arbitrators if the Wikimedia Foundation would be willing to pay for them or find some way to get them to work for free.
Yes.
They have buckets of money, what else is it for. People have told me privately that they are going to get sued, I don't know what their liability is for the arbitration committee, but maybe they should do some kind of risk analysis. I think most of the decision makers are indemnified, but I'm not sure if this applies to the arbitrators.
The End wrote:Fat chance that would happen either way. The WMF will not spend money on that kind of thing and no professional would want to work for free in a stressful community like Wikipedia, at least not for long.
This is not the first suggestion of professional mediators that I have heard. Unions have this kind of thing, the mediators have to be trained somehow. Perhaps the WMF could work with professional mediators to set up a system that would work with this unique community.
Anyone with mediation experience, or consensus process (developed widely in the late twentieth century) would recognize how poorly ArbCom was constructed and elected an operated. Sometimes, it worked well, which fooled me for a time. They had a private mailing list, hacked and revealed on Wikipedia Review, that showed how it really worked.
The election method, called approval at large by those who study such things (like me!) is lousy if you want full or even wide representation. It elects the most popular candidates, and can, under some conditions, even shut out a majority from being represented.
Electing the most popular seemed, to the naive users founding Wikipedia, to be a way to create consensus. It is not, and all this was well-known, to those who study such things. Even supermajority election fails, readily, and especially if voting is by a relatively small number. There are methods for developing true proportional representation.
An article on one was attacked heavily.
Asset Voting is a form of Single Transferable Vote which would address the problems of that method. It does not depend on political parties and "party list," which STV, in actual practice, does. It's simple and easy. But . . . it works, and it makes political parties obsolete, at least in some ways, one can get elected without any party endorsement. It is sometimes not even thought to be an "election method," because it is not deterministic on the ballots, but through what I have called the "electoral college," after the obvious analogy with the intentions of the U.S. system.
See also
Proxy Voting and
Liquid Democracy. Also see
WP:PRX which was proposed as an experiment. The file system was actually set up, and deleted. No voluntary experimentation allowed on this. There was
an MfD, the majority voting shows a fervent belief, "we don't vote," and "kill and salt," and then see a DRV filing. where those siding with the majority claimed that the majority opinion had not been followed. In other words, the vote was not respected, truly ironic.
But
WP:PRX wasn't about votingg, it was about estimating representation. Yes, it could have been used to elect ArbCom, as an example, but that was not proposed. Just
thinking about this, on-wiki, was to be prohibited, and the user who created that was promptly blocked for pointing it out to the arbitrators. Yeah, he was a troll, certainly became one, but he had been a nondisruptive user before that (he actually went way back, and had retired an older and very active account in good standing). He had believed in Wikipedia, and then. . . . It may have been what drove him over the edge, and he became highly disruptive, in many ways.)
Instead, ArbCom's election method, and the habits of the community, made it a political body that sometimes acted with an intention of neutrality, but often not. I pointed out some of the issues in my cases, and, of course, the AC didn't like that at all. I pointed to the obvious, factional participation in certain discussions, easily seen if one looks. They reprimanded me for not proving violation of policy. But there was no violation of policy and I did not claim there was, except for the very vague one of supporting factional behavior. I put this before ArbCom because I imagined they would consider it. Instead, they allowed the evidence presented to be deleted, at the request of . . . JzG. And they didn't care.
Filing an ArbCom case against a user supported by a major faction was wiki-suicide. ArbCom, by allowing the filer to be the subject of deliberation, shot the messengers, instead of requiring a separate action be filed on that point. In other words, if you present a case, but do so in a way that can be criticized, you may be attacked and then banned for creating disruption.
You'd better be perfect.
I was close, but by the time of the second case, I'd become involved in editing cold fusion and they could claim, with a straight face, that I was involved. In fact, I avoided controversial edits, but they didn't care. They could then claim that I was a "POV-pusher" and it wouldn't look as crazy as when I filed the first case. Still, they desyopped William M. Connelly, for what? For enforcing his own declared ban of me from cold fusion, and a few other pecadillos. They allowed him to protect the real troll there: Hipocrite.
It's all very obvious to anyone who actually looks at editing history. But very few do that. Too much work. Volunteers, after all.
So wait, what could they do if it is, in fact, too much work?
Well,
find users who are willing to investigate, trusted by the ArbCom member.
Take responsibility for them. (Wikis are allergic to responsibility, in general, and that is how they become so unreliable.)
Give them the investigative tools, any Arb could do that, under a declared restriction: no use of tools for anything other than investigation. Perhaps the only logged actions would be checkuser. This, of course, would violate policy, but did ArbCom ever attempt to reform the policy in a way that would give them a powerful tool? The kind used by any top-level organizational committee? Staff!
The investigator would have agreed to privacy, may have provided the WMF with identification (required for checkuser), for anything hidden, and reports privately to the arbitrator. The arbitrator decides what can be published.
At one point, ArbCom created a committee to consider reforms. Anyone could apply to join and they intended it to be open. The "community" attacked it viciously. "Elitism!" And, instead of standing up to the community -- only, really, a small minority -- they backed down. So something else was missing. Spine, it is more neutrally called, rather than the sexist term.
Neotarf did not continue to be active here, but is suspected to be still active in some of the best Wikipedia critique on the net. I don't care who this person is, they are a great writer.
