I have a good amount of experience with the arbcom, having, I believe, a record for number of cases involved in. I have a lot of respect for what the job takes, and I feel confident saying that the single biggest thing it takes is wading through evidence pages - often confusingly ordered and worded evidence pages. It involves reading diffs, and a huge amount of dedication to piecing together what's going on.
This is a change from what the arbcom needed last year. Last year, the arbcom was dealing with cases like Lir, Plautus, and Irismeister regularly, and dragging at them. That's not the case this year - the last slam dunk malevolent user the arbcom dealt with was Plautus, which took them a week.
Anyone who knows me knows I'm not one to tolerate disruption, trolling, and malicious intent, and I won't - those who come to Wikipedia to be pains in the ass should be shown the door as soon as possible, and I'd prefer those cases never even hit the arbcom. But when they do, I will act to protect Wikipedia from the abusive. But that's not 10% of what the arbcom is about now.
It doesn't take anyone special to ban Plautus or Lir - I doubt there's a person running in this election who wouldn't have done that. What we need are arbitrators who are willing and able to put in the commitment to the harder cases - to the ones that involve the well-meaning editors with a legitimate disagreement that need to be disentangled, not smashed with a banstick.
Different circumstances require different kinds of arbitrators. And I promise to be one of those different kinds of arbitrators. If elected, I promise to review evidence carefully, and to look at situations with the larger Wikipedia community in mind. Like it or not, arbcom decisions are cited as justifications in policy debates now, and the arbcom needs to be careful about what it says in light of that. A recent near-disaster is the Coolcat case, when the arbcom nearly made a ruling that could easily have been interpreted as shutting down informal mediation. I was one of the ones who pointed out that problem, and if elected, I intend to keep problems like that from happening - without abandoning the need for effective rulings that minimize the need for repeat cases.
The point of the arbcom is to take difficult disputes - dispute that are disrupting Wikipedia, and making it impossible for articles to improve, and make it so that the articles can improve. Nothing more, nothing less. I understand that well, and if elected, you can trust that I won't forget it. And you can trust that I will be diligent and attentive to my duties. I promise that no case will sit more than two weeks without my attention - whether in the form of a vote, or in the form of a specific question to participants to clarify the matter.
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