User:John Vandenberg/Arbcom participation
For background, see the January to June 2009 summary, and the lovely stats created by user:Paul August.
Requests for arbitration
I declined four cases of the 26 cases which the committee voted on during my term. (Maria Thayer, SemBubenny, MZMcBride, Ottava Rima restrictions)
Every request that I voted accept resulted in a case or motion.
I did not "act" on 25% of the requests. See Paul August's statistics for the meaning of 'act'.
Public motions
Of the 71 motions (request, amendment and clarification), I wrote the highest number of motions (20), the highest number which passed (11), and the highest number which failed (9). My passed:failed ratio was middle of the range, and was well above the arbitrator who wrote the second highest number of motions (Coren, with 15 in total).
Private Arbcom motions
I voted on 40 of the 44 motions decided by Arbcom privately and published on the Noticeboard with arbitrator votes.
Sub-committee work
I was a member of the Audit Subcommittee from inception in April 2009 until December 2009, covering the period when all published reports (to date) were investigated.
I was a member of the Ban Subcommittee from July 2009 until October 2009.
Arbitration case drafting
I was the drafting arbitrator for two cases.
The less said about that one, the better. I could pull some diffs together to justify parts of what went wrong, but I doubt is it worth revisiting as the communities verdict was given long ago.
I took the Asmahan case in order to gain more experience in this area. The case opened on Sept 16 with Fayssal as the drafting arbitrator, and was put on hold. Due to exceptional circumstances, I took over the case on October 20[1] and put up a set of questions for the parties on October 24. Once the parties had provided answers, the draft decision went up on 14 November 2009. The workshop was an involved process, with comments by parties, non-parties and arbitrators, sorting out some conceptual and wording issues before the proposed decision. It is a shame that I can't claim the full credit for the Asmahan case.
After I resigned, Wizardman took this case over. He extensively used my draft, but also adjusted it to make it his own.
Wizardman's changes were primarily:
- Principles: A nice rewrite of my principle 2 to create Principle: Neutral point of view and undue weight and dropping my principle 3 in the process. Wizardman also added Decorum (3) and Edit warring (6).
- Findings of fact: The two edit-warring findings of fact were revised, as were some section titles.
- Remedies: Alternatives were added for the topic bans, "Discretionary sanctions for articles under probation" was revised and split into two, and "Editors reminded" was added.
- (My apologies if I have missed any other changes that Wizardman made; please feel free to change this to suit.)
I would like to be remembered for the principle Identity disputes.
However the most important aspect of that case is the outcome: at least one of the two editors still with us, contributing prolificly[2], and they have since participated constructively on the topic of the case (Talk:Asmahan/Archive_4#corrections).
Oversight & Checkuser
Statistics on my use of these tools can be found here.
On my resignation from ArbCom, I requested removal of oversight and checkuser on English Wikipedia[3], and unsubscribed from oversight-l. I remained on checkuser-l as I am also a checkuser on English Wikisource (user:Billinghurst does 99% of the checkuser work there).
In response to the need, I applied the following day to be a candidate in the OS/CU election, and/or resume use of checkuser immediately, and oversight in a months time. On April 7 ArbCom announced that my holiday was over.
I have returned to my regular levels of usage of these tools since then.
- Oversight
In the six months prior to the Oversight tool being deprecated, I was the highest usage of the tool, and I was a regular contributor to the oversight-l mailing list discussions and responses. After the introduction of the Suppression tool, and the much needed appointment of four volunteers, my participation rate dropped to around average.
- Checkuser
I have not been a prolific checkuser as I don't regularly help out at WP:SPI. Instead I tend to use the tool in relation to ArbCom and WP:Functionaries-en matters.