This post was submitted to The Wikipedia Review on November 3rd, 2007 by The Review’s resident legal-eagle, GlassBeadGame. The original post can found here.

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Ten Reasons Why The Arbitration Committee Doesn’t Matter

1. ArbCom is creature of Mr. Wales, the last vestige of the Cult of the Godking;
2. The processes and procedures of ArbCom are amateurish and slipshod;
3. It encourages meddling and humiliation by allowing anyone to comment in disputes in which they have no standing and nothing relevant to contribute;
4. It is utterly lost in discerning the difference between evidence, opinion and rumor;
5. By confusing its role as the trier of fact with that of investigator they take on a star-chamber character;
6. Community over-involvement in the process brings in all the evils of the dysfunctional social networking community;
7. It is openly a respecter of persons and influence and not a provider of equal application;
8. Its collaborative authoring methods leads to atomized, disjointed, incomprehensible and inconsistent decisions;
9. It declines application of it’s own decisions as precedent, denying guidance to those depending on its decisions, and;
10. It is lead by and intimately tainted from its inception by a legal professional who left practice after receiving discipline for a serious and unresolved ethical lapse.

(NB: I gave it a lot of thought before I made it a practice to discuss one arbitrator’s professional ethical lapses in relation to his ArbCom role. It is his repeatedly taking recourse to undue influence and privilege, often in his wikien-l postings in which he regularly makes reference to his background as a lawyer which finally persuaded me that this was appropriate. He opens the door into his conduct as a lawyer.)