What exactly is it that Arbs do?, And why the hell does it take forty two months for anyone of them to l Options

[radek]

Can anyone explain this mystery to me?

I understand that there maybe a lot of *sekirt sht* that arbs have to deal with before they actually issue their words of wisdom on a particular case/amendment/appeal. Uhh... what is it? Or at least let's have an affirmation that there is a lot of sekrit sht that delays a timely response on these cases.

Seriously, the length of time before something is actually brought up and before it is... even commented upon is something like a month... and that's just the first comment. Then it takes another two weeks or so before another comment is made. And so it goes on and on and on... Why? Are they sifting through some super secret files? I know there's some present and former Arbs around here so could they please explain it to us lesser folks?

Some interesting associated phenomenon:

1. From what I understand the on-Wiki activity of people newly elected to ArbCom all of sudden drops. So maybe they are dealing with the sekrit sht.
2. Or maybe they just rest on their laurels.
3. Except that most of them usually campaign on the platform (in some way or another) of making ArbCom more timely and "transparent"? Can anyone point to an instance where the ArbCom - or at least an individual members choices - somehow became noticeably more transparent?
4. The fact that even the candidates that you have some hope for that are initially "rebels" - *cough* Iridescent *cough* - end up doing the exact same thing... taking for ever... so maybe it is a structural problem. or maybe they just rest on their laurels.

Regardless, they may be a good reason for why the ArbCom appears so slow and inefficient. But at the very least, let us know! My sense of it is that by definition ArbCom has to deal with pain-in-the-ass, hard to define, uncomfortable cases and these are exactly the kinds of situations which any normal person procrastinates as much as possible (like doing your taxes on April 15th). Add that up across all the multiple members and you get institutional laziness. But part of what we pay them for is to resolve these things in a timely fashion. I want my money back. Way I figure it by this time, ArbCom as a collective entity owns me a few hundred dollars worth of compensation for stress and psychological damage incurred due to my breathless and frustrated waiting for its decision.

At the very least - how about one of the former ArbCom members that frequent this forum gives us a "day in the life" rundown. The plebs want to know.

[melloden]

loooooooooool.

Maybe I'm an arb ....... or not. I'm guessing the answer is wait to make the process look really bureaucratic and elite, secretly checkuser everyone, and block the annoying users before they can actually change arbcom's authority.

Any answer you get from an arb will just make things more secret ... it's not like they're going to go out and reveal the behind-the-scenes cabal-ing.

[radek]

loooooooooool.

Maybe I'm an arb ....... or not. I'm guessing the answer is wait to make the process look really bureaucratic and elite, secretly checkuser everyone, and block the annoying users before they can actually change arbcom's authority.

Any answer you get from an arb will just make things more secret ... it's not like they're going to go out and reveal the behind-the-scenes cabal-ing.

In a way, I guess because my expectations are so low, I'm fine with the explanation that they're all caballing and caballizing. If they're busy checkusering everyone that'd at least be an excuse. But I've paid attention to some of these and I don't think that's what they're doing (it actually wouldn't be a bad thing necessarily). I also reject the explanation that the delays are done on purpose just in order to make the process seem more mystical - again, the fact that new arbs seem to fall into the same patterns bespeaks against it (unless the conspiracy runs deeper than I think and the new appointees are actually pre-chosen and the whole election thing is a scam - but now I'm sounding like one of those crazy Wikipedia Review people)

If the Wikipedia Signpost was in any way a useful news organ we'd at least get one of those hard-hitting 60-minute type interviews where the elusive ArbCom member is allowed to feed us a convincing and plausible sounding line of bullshit in response to difficult sounding questions. All scripted of course but the fact that they'd bother to put on this show would at least let us know that they care, at least a bit, about appearances.

[thekohser]

I didn't want to have to do this, but I can't keep the secret any longer.

The reason why new (and veteran) Arbs take so long with everything is that they've hired me out to provide an online webinar series... "Troll Spotting 101". We get together for the first week, 90 minutes a day, just going through all of my dozens of sockpuppets to learn the patterns and purposes of each.

Then, the second week is more of the same, but we spend a day on Jon Awbrey, then a day on Tony Sidaway, then a day on David Gerard, etc. (I don't want to give away too much here. I'm being paid BIG bucks for these training sessions.)

The third week, we look at POV-pushing, looking at SlimVirgin, Jayjg, Cirt, etc.

In the fourth week, I have a bit of fun with the Arbs, where we all make a sockpuppet, and we see who can go the longest without being caught, then multiplying it by an "outlandishness" factor.

It is a wonder any of the Arbs get anything done, what with all these mandatory seminars that the Foundation has asked them to take with me.

[Kelly Martin]

You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that the purpose of the ArbCom is to facilitate the authoring of an encyclopedia. Please recheck your assumptions and begin your analysis again.

[Eva Destruction]

4. The fact that even the candidates that you have some hope for that are initially "rebels" - *cough* Iridescent *cough* - end up doing the exact same thing... taking for ever... so maybe it is a structural problem. or maybe they just rest on their laurels.

Check my history—I've barely been active anywhere (there or here) for the last couple of months, other than poking my head in every few days to see if there's anything urgent that can't wait. When real life and Wikipedia compete for time, real life always wins. My Arbcom activities have been limited to replying to a few emails. (The barrage of emails—not all of which are from Ottava—is overwhelming. This image isn't doctored.)

(For the record, note that I never said anything anywhere at any time about "making arbcom more timely and transparent". I believe it ought to have its remit drastically reduced, and the dispute-resolution and handling-problem-users sides split into independent bodies to reduce the Judge Dredd aspects of the way Wikipedia is run—and have got people talking about whether this is possible and desirable and how it might be done, which is the most one can hope for when one's outnumbered 16–2 on an issue—but that's a very different matter, although I do believe a more limited remit would solve the "timely" issue. Given the mix of kiddy-fiddlers, drama queens, libel-mongers and criminal psychopaths who inhabit the murkier edges of Wikipedia, there are excellent reasons to avoid having some discussions in the full view of Google's spiders; that's one issue on which the most devout Jimbo-cultists and the most die-hard Someys and GBGs agree.)

This post has been edited by Eva Destruction:

[Kelly Martin]

CONTENT issues should be resolved by an open jury panel process. CONDUCT issues should be resolved entirely in private with the deciding body publishing only as much as is needed to implement the resolution.

The ArbCom is the standing disciplinary committee of a voluntary society (even though it does not recognize itself as such, that's what it is). There is no authority anywhere that even remotely suggests that such committees should conduct their business in open session, and a basic understanding of things like defamation law would lead any reasonable person to understand why conducting all such matters in private as much as is logically possible is the most reasonable approach. The reason the ArbCom does not do so is that it is dominated (within and without) by drama hounds.

So my advice to the ArbCom is: discontinue all case-related pages on the wiki. Post only summary orders describing who is being sanctioned and the nature of those sanctions. Do not try, in public, to explain the reason for those sanctions, for doing so merely amounts to defaming those parties involved to no purpose. The only reason you should ever give is "the best interests of the project"; anything else amounts to a judgment on character that you have neither the right nor the capacity to make. Do not allow comment, of any sort, on these announcements. To quote RONR: "Neither the society nor any of its members has the right to make pubic the charge of which an expelled member has been found guilty, or to reveal any other details connected with the case." (RONR, 10th ed, p.630, l. 32-35, and, yes, the typo is in the original)

One of Wikipedia's problems is that its membership is poorly defined, and in any case the membership cannot in general be trusted to observe the above stricture. Because of this, its disciplinary committee must necessarily keep most of the details of any disciplinary proceedings it conducts secret from the general membership in order to keep them from being spread to the public generally.

Wikipedia, however, enjoys its show trials far too much to give them up, and I rather expect that any attempt to reform ArbCom to behave in a mature and proper manner will fail utterly; even if by some chance a majority of its membership agreed to take appropriate measures, they would only be voted out at the next election because the electorate wants the drama and would almost certainly seek to punish those who take it from them.

[Eva Destruction]

CONTENT issues should be resolved by an open jury panel process. CONDUCT issues should be resolved entirely in private with the deciding body publishing only as much as is needed to implement the resolution.

The ArbCom is the standing disciplinary committee of a voluntary society (even though it does not recognize itself as such, that's what it is). There is no authority anywhere that even remotely suggests that such committees should conduct their business in open session, and a basic understanding of things like defamation law would lead any reasonable person to understand why conducting all such matters in private as much as is logically possible is the most reasonable approach. The reason the ArbCom does not do so is that it is dominated (within and without) by drama hounds.

So my advice to the ArbCom is: discontinue all case-related pages on the wiki. Post only summary orders describing who is being sanctioned and the nature of those sanctions. Do not try, in public, to explain the reason for those sanctions, for doing so merely amounts to defaming those parties involved to no purpose. The only reason you should ever give is "the best interests of the project"; anything else amounts to a judgment on character that you have neither the right nor the capacity to make. Do not allow comment, of any sort, on these announcements. To quote RONR: "Neither the society nor any of its members has the right to make pubic the charge of which an expelled member has been found guilty, or to reveal any other details connected with the case." (RONR, 10th ed, p.630, l. 32-35, and, yes, the typo is in the original)

One of Wikipedia's problems is that its membership is poorly defined, and in any case the membership cannot in general be trusted to observe the above stricture. Because of this, its disciplinary committee must necessarily keep most of the details of any disciplinary proceedings it conducts secret from the general membership in order to keep them from being spread to the public generally.

Wikipedia, however, enjoys its show trials far too much to give them up, and I rather doubt that an attempt to reform ArbCom to behave in a mature and proper manner will fail utterly; even if by some chance a majority of its membership agreed to take appropriate measures, they would only be voted out at the next election because the electorate wants the drama and would almost certainly seek to punish those who take it from them.

Agree with all that. I'd go further, and have conduct and content decisions made by separate bodies. However, that's not how it's currently set up and you can only work with the tools you have.

[Kelly Martin]

Agree with all that. I'd go further, and have conduct and content decisions made by separate bodies. However, that's not how it's currently set up and you can only work with the tools you have.

I thought I was clear on that point too; the ArbCom is a disciplinary committee, not an editorial board, and has neither the authority nor the competence to make content decisions. As far as I am aware, Wikipedia has no process at all for making content decisions, other than by characterizing editing with an unapproved point of view as a form of misconduct, and even then they usually dance around that issue.

As to "tool you have available", you're an admin, I believe; you can delete all the inappropriate pages related to Arbitration (which is to say, just about all of them). About the only one that should remain, honestly, is the "requested enforcement" page and even that one needs substantial editing. Is it because you believe that you'd be defrocked for such tomfoolery, even when it's actually required by Wikipedia policy?

[gomi]

With due respect, it is clear by now what the primary purpose of Wikipedia ArbCom is: to enforce and maintain the status quo, to eliminate those who try to improve or mature Wikipedia, and generally to bolster the cadre of editors and admins who tightly control it.

This requires slow, tedious work. This is mostly to ensure that by the time they decide anything, everyone will have forgotten what the real issues were (as opposed to the smokescreen thrown up in the case itself).

Punishments meted out are mostly symbolic: whenever it is opportune to show a symbolic punishment to a member of the cadre, it is short-term and circumscribed. Every now and then a death sentence is handed down on some more-or-less randomly selected defendant, pour encourager les autres.

ArbCom is an important Wikipedia institution, in that it prevents anything from improving, acting as a flywheel on such ambitions as improving BLPs, treating experts better, refining "consensus" and generally dismantling the warlord society so dear to senior Wikipedia admins. Don't worry, they'll never change, just continue to sink into irrelevance.

[Sarcasticidealist]

At the very least - how about one of the former ArbCom members that frequent this forum gives us a "day in the life" rundown. The plebs want to know.

Fair enough. I'd typically wake up at about seven, depending on when my first class began, and flail madly about for the clock radio, that I might clumsily mash its snooze button (I hide my clock radio on myself when my girlfriend's not around to increase its odds of waking me up)...

More seriously, I think most of what you advance is valid. There is a great deal that goes on behind the scenes and that commands a lot of the time that arbitrators are willing/able to devote to arbitration (and for me, I found that time to be less than I had previously been willing to devote to writing articles, because I found the latter enjoyable and the former largely soul-crushing). Your procrastination hypothesis is also a good one - I certainly tend to procrastinate more on soul-crushing things than on less soul-crushing things.

Beyond that, individuals on ArbCom are seldom responsible for specific things (case drafting being the one exception I can think of). This means that things fall through the cracks easily and often - arbs generally reply (internally, usually) to e-mails that grab their interest and on which they feel they have something to contribute, and leave the others for other arbs to handle. Of course, sometimes no other arb handles it.

With cases specifically, sometimes what appeared to be inactivity was actually a period of consensus (in the real, not Wikipedia, sense of the word) seeking to make the actual voting run more smoothly.

These factors frequently combine to produce delays that either appear or are unacceptable (the latter was true in your amendment request, but the former is common too).

Though I don't buy into Kelly and Gomi's pseudo-conspiratorial view of ArbCom (they might consider looking into Occam's Razor, or at least reading Cock-Up's signature), I have come to the conclusion that it can't work. I don't feel like devoting the time to writing that essay now, but I will if I ever go back to Wikipedia.

[Ottava]

My Arbcom activities have been limited to replying to a few emails. (The barrage of emails—not all of which are from Ottava—is overwhelming. This image isn't doctored.)

I've only sent one email to ArbCom since the beginning of the year. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/unhappy.gif)


By the way, Judge Dredd is a rather kick ass comic. It is also one of the few major, worldwide comics that is "British".

This post has been edited by Ottava:

[Eva Destruction]

My Arbcom activities have been limited to replying to a few emails. (The barrage of emails—not all of which are from Ottava—is overwhelming. This image isn't doctored.)

I've only sent one email to ArbCom since the beginning of the year. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/unhappy.gif)


By the way, Judge Dredd is a rather kick ass comic. It is also one of the few major, worldwide comics that is "British".

You've sent me eight emails in the last week alone. (A lot of major comics are British, most obviously Malleus's beloved V for Vendetta, and the driving force behind the revival of DC Comics was the Alan Moore–Neil Gaiman team, both of whom are English almost to the point of parody.)

[gomi]

Though I don't buy into Kelly and Gomi's pseudo-conspiratorial view of ArbCom (they might consider looking into Occam's Razor, or at least reading Cock-Up's signature), I have come to the conclusion that it can't work. I don't feel like devoting the time to writing that essay now, but I will if I ever go back to Wikipedia.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think that ArbCom achieves their utter worthlessness out of conspiratorial direct action. I think they are innately worthless. It requires no conspiracy whatsoever, unless it is "a conspiracy of dunces".

That it takes great volumes of dialog and many man-hours of useless "action" to achieve nothing is another hallmark of the <cough> "intelligent design" of the committee.

[radek]

4. The fact that even the candidates that you have some hope for that are initially "rebels" - *cough* Iridescent *cough* - end up doing the exact same thing... taking for ever... so maybe it is a structural problem. or maybe they just rest on their laurels.

Check my history—I've barely been active anywhere (there or here) for the last couple of months, other than poking my head in every few days to see if there's anything urgent that can't wait. When real life and Wikipedia compete for time, real life always wins. My Arbcom activities have been limited to replying to a few emails. (The barrage of emails—not all of which are from Ottava—is overwhelming. This image isn't doctored.)

(For the record, note that I never said anything anywhere at any time about "making arbcom more timely and transparent". I believe it ought to have its remit drastically reduced, and the dispute-resolution and handling-problem-users sides split into independent bodies to reduce the Judge Dredd aspects of the way Wikipedia is run—and have got people talking about whether this is possible and desirable and how it might be done, which is the most one can hope for when one's outnumbered 16–2 on an issue—but that's a very different matter, although I do believe a more limited remit would solve the "timely" issue. Given the mix of kiddy-fiddlers, drama queens, libel-mongers and criminal psychopaths who inhabit the murkier edges of Wikipedia, there are excellent reasons to avoid having some discussions in the full view of Google's spiders; that's one issue on which the most devout Jimbo-cultists and the most die-hard Someys and GBGs agree.)

I was imprecise. I didn't mean to imply that you in particular ran on a "making arbcom more timely and transparent" platform - that was just the previous point, that many of the candidates do run on such a platform. I meant that I had (and still have) high hopes for you.

Actually, something like the image of that mailbox is what I was asking for.

[RMHED]

Why don't we go back to mocking Arbcom? It's more happy funsy-timey.

Why bother, they make a mockery of themselves and need no help from us.

[melloden]

Why don't we go back to mocking Arbcom? It's more happy funsy-timey.

ArbCom = comical. Discussion of British comics is therefore related to this thread. Also, ArbCom is pretty self-explanatory: everything they do is like a government subcommittee, which means they don't actually do anything useful.

[gomi]

[Mod note: Comix stuff moved to the Politics forum. It seemed apropos.]

[radek]

Thanks to Sarcasticidealist and Eva, as well as all other arbs, quasi arbs, maybe arbs and definitely not arbs, present and former who offered up the info.

'was wondering - a lot of this sounds like simple coordination problems - why not choose one particular member as "coordinator/whip" and have it on rotating basis?

[Milton Roe]

'was wondering - a lot of this sounds like simple coordination problems - why not choose one particular member as "coordinator/whip" and have it on rotating basis?

I want to see Gomi's bobble-Jesus with a whip. Sort of the temple-cleansing version. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif)