SimonP, MindSpillage, Raul654, KellyMartin and Jdforrester are on the 15-person Wikipedia Arbitration Committee. (Well, Kelly used to be on it.) It was established because there people who want to make Wikipedia worse, and there needs to be a way to deal with them. In 2003, Jimbo Wales put a message on the mailing list looking for volunteers. The initial volunteers came up with a policy. Jimbo accepted it, and the community liked it.

It becomes a Q&A session…

The committee usually accepts cases when there have been other attempts at resolving it. By the time it gets to arbitration, it’s probably gone beyond the point of mediation.

There have been about 200-250 cases so far.

They discuss “brittle users” who have a lot to add as contributors and editors but who are unable to work with others.

The Committee technically only recommends banning. The “sentence” is carried out by the administrators. If the community disagrees with the decision, it may not be carried out.

Someone recently looked at all the banned users and found about 90% never return and 9% came back as problems, and 1% came back as good users. [I think I got those numbers right.]

They rarely disagree on matters of principle — if you delete a page, you should say why, for example — and they usually agree if someone is a problem user. They often disagree about the remedy.

If you don’t respond to requests for clarification, etc., you are likely to be banned by an administrator without it ever going to arbitration. A single other administrator can unban you.

“We are not a court. We don’t make precedent. And we don’t guarantee that we’ll be fair.”

Sometimes they ban someone from editing their own, or their company’s, article.

Other remedies besides banning: Mentoring. Banning from a particular article. Limiting the number of reverts per day. Reading particular pages, e.g., copyright policy. In one case, a contributor was required to provide explanations when he reverts pages, because he was reverting certain contributors’ changes on sight — because those contributors’ changes were stupid. So, even though he was right, he was put under a restriction. [Process!] In some cases, people have been banned for following policy, but doing so in obnoxious ways.

They don’t have a lot of policy disputes, but there are some. E.g., one of the members isn’t as convinced that NPOV is right. But cases aren’t over policy. It’s usually not a fine line decision: “Is the user a pest?”

“Essentially, the overriding rule is common sense. The problem usually is people not knowing what common sense is.”

The Committee stays out of content disputes. The issues tend to be ones of disruptive editing. “It’s not Wikipedia’s job to define reality or truth.”

There are some death threats pending against some of the arbitrators. [Yikes!] [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia]

Categories: Uncategorized dw