Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2010/Candidates/Jclemens/Questions

General questions

Skills/interests: Which of the following tasks will you be prepared and qualified to perform regularly as an arbitrator? Your responses should indicate how your professional/educational background makes you suitable to the tasks.
- (a) reviewing cases, carefully weighing up the evidence, and voting and commenting on proposed decisions;
- (b) drafting proposed decisions for consideration by other arbitrators;
- (c) voting on new requests for arbitration (on the requests page) and motions for the clarification or modification of prior decisions;
- (d) considering appeals from banned or long-term-blocked users, such as by serving on the Ban Appeals Subcommittee or considering the Subcommittee's recommendations;
- (e) overseeing the allocation and use of checkuser and oversight permissions, including the vetting and community consultation of candidates for them, and/or serving on the Audit Subcommittee or reviewing its recommendations;
- (f) running checkuser checks (arbitrators generally are given access to CU if they request it) in connection with arbitration cases or other appropriate requests;
- (g) carrying out oversight or edit suppression requests (arbitrators are generally also given OS privileges);
- (h) drafting responses to inquiries and concerns forwarded to the Committee by editors;
- (i) interacting with the community on public pages such as arbitration and other talk pages;
- (j) performing internal tasks such as coordinating the sometimes-overwhelming arbcom-l mailing list traffic.
A: (a), (b), and (i) I've done as an administrator participating in AN, ANI, and DRV for a couple of years; I've drafted a few topic bans with varying success, written position statements in various RfCs, and generally been a regular participant in the community's discussions on how we run ourselves.

For the rest, I'm going to rely on my real-world experience, which includes 10 years as a computer security practitioner in a Fortune 100 company. I've done everything from writing policy to conducting internal investigations that led to terminations.
Stress: How will you be able to cope with the stress of being an arbitrator, potentially including on- and off-wiki threats and abuse, and attempts to embarrass you by the public "outing" of personal information?
A: I live my life such that outing is not a big deal for me. My truly private information is generally not on the Internet, and I'm currently a full-time graduate student without an employer to harass. I've contributed to internal investigations that led to felony charges before (see above), and run a MUD for ~15 years, so dealing with conduct issues on Wikipedia would not be a step into an unknown realm for me.

Since I've stepped back from contributing to contentious areas, I find my Wikistress level has been markedly lower, and I intend to maintain that by erring on the side of recusal when I might be tempted to care about the participants or details of a case more than the principles involved and the overall needs of Wikipedia.
Principles: Assume the four principles linked to below are directly relevant to the facts of a new case. Would you support or oppose each should it be proposed in a case you are deciding, and why? A one- or two-sentence answer is sufficient for each. Please regard them in isolation rather than in the context of their original cases.
- (a) "Private correspondence"
  A:While I agree that private correspondence should not be posted in public, I think the underlying reasoning is inaccurate. When a person sends a message to another, they are (in gross US legal terms) making a phone call, not writing a sonnet. Thus, protections on electronic communication privacy under U.S. law are based on wiretapping laws rather copyright laws. I'm not familiar with any law against an authorized recipient forwarding or reposting an email, so for us to imply such might be a copyright violation is inappropriate. I think it's more appropriate for the community to codify that as a Wikipedia rule, rather than to piggyback on laws of questionable applicability.
- (b) "Responsibility"
  A: I would clarify the “this does not apply...” section to state that everyone is responsible to explain their actions to the appropriate parties. In the case of actions not subject to public review, I would say accountability and responsibility are more important.
- (c) "Perceived legal threats"
  A: A good general behavioral expectation; I would lump implied legal threats with general incivility. That is, if editors are disagreeing passionately but politely, such ambiguous terminology need not arise. I prefer WP:NLT and its associated blocking to be strictly limited to overt threats of lawsuit.
- (d) "Outing"
  A: I agree with all but the final sentence (“If a user has redacted that information, their wishes should be respected.”): On the Internet, there is no taking back what one has said, and I see no reason Wikipedia should be immune from that principle.
Strict versus lenient: Although every case is different and must be evaluated on its own merits, would you side more with those who tend to believe in second chances and lighter sanctions, or with those who support a greater number of bans and desysoppings? What factors might generally influence you? Under what circumstances would you consider desysopping an admin without a prior ArbCom case?
A: If there is a chance community sanctions and intervention can work appropriately, it should be conclusively exhausted before a case has reached ArbCom. Thus, when leniency is an appropriate option, I would generally not vote to take such a case. If the various parties cannot resolve their differences through community processes, then all parties should expect that bans, topic bans, and desysopings may be handed out to any participant whose conduct has contributed to the failure of community dispute resolution to solve the issue.

As the community currently lacks a sub-Arbcom method of de-sysoping problematic admins, it is especially incumbent upon ArbCom to be responsive to community input on administrator conduct. Administrators will find me sympathetic to good-faith mistakes, less so to repeated incivility, abuse of tools in content disputes, or misconstruing IAR as a license to ignore consensus.
ArbCom and policies: Do you agree or disagree with this statement: "ArbCom should not be in the position of forming new policies, or otherwise creating, abolishing or amending policy. ArbCom should rule on the underlying principles of the rules. If there is an area of the rules that leaves something confused, overly vague, or seemingly contrary to common good practice, then the issue should be pointed out to the community". Please give reasons.
A: ArbCom should ultimately be the community's guardian of the five pillars; they are the core principles that underly and inform all the policies. ArbCom has used the “principles” affirmations in every arbitration decision to reinforce the reasoning underpinning each outcome. I think those affirmations, as they have percolated through other policy discussions, have proven to be sufficient to communicate Wikipedia's shared culture to newcomers. Thus, ArbCom has historically “nudged” policy through such reminders and left implementation to the community. I think overt governance by ArbCom is both unworkable and inconsistent with the five pillars themselves.
Conduct/content: ArbCom has historically not made direct content rulings, e.g., how a disputed article should read. To what extent can ArbCom aid in content disputes? Can, and should, the Committee establish procedures by which the community can achieve binding content dispute resolution in the event of long-term content disputes that the community has been unable to resolve?
A: ArbCom has generally only become involved once community dispute resolution has failed, and then generally to rule on conduct issues. In the case of some hypothetical grand, deadlocked disagreement where it was 1) disruptive to not have a final resolution, 2) substantially all participants agreed that community dispute resolution has failed, and 3) substantially all participants agreed to seek ArbCom judgement, and 4) ArbCom itself believes that serving in such a fashion is appropriate, I would not oppose such a decision. This is entirely theoretical, however, in that in during the past two years I have seen no such deadlocked case where conduct issues were not a part of the problem.
Success in handling cases: Nominate the cases from 2010 you think ArbCom handled more successfully, and those you think it handled less successfully? Please give your reasons.
A: I haven't followed any ArbCom cases closely enough to provide informed constructive criticism. I'll be happy to answer specific questions as raised.
Proposals for change? What changes, if any, in how ArbCom works would you propose as an arbitrator, and how would you work within the Committee towards bringing these changes about?
A: I think that ArbCom is doing relatively well; I'm not running to reform ArbCom, I'm actually hoping to help the existing arbitrators continue resolving things in even-handed manner. I'd like to see increased speed of handling cases, while not compromising fair and impartial treatment of all participants.

Individual questions

This section is for individual questions asked to this specific candidate. Each eligible voter may ask a limit of one "individual" question by posting it below. The question should:

be clearly worded and brief, with a limit of 75 words in display mode;
be specific to this candidate (the same individual question should not be posted en masse onto candidates' pages);
not duplicate other questions (editors are encouraged to discuss the merging of similar questions);

Election coordinators will either remove questions that are inconsistent with the guidelines or will contact the editor to ask for an amendment. Editors are, of course, welcome to post questions to candidates' user talk pages at any time.

Please add the question under the line below using the following format:

Question:
A:

Question: Is your questions talk page open for additional questions? NW (Talk) 12:36, 22 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
A: Sure. I'll answer there as I have time, while giving priority to this, the "official" questions page. Thanks for an easy first question. Jclemens (talk) 15:17, 22 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Question: Personally... I've never seen any sanction for refusal to get the point or stonewalling. People are allowed their opinion, even when community consensus opposes it. But acting like a fringe viewpoint is right can disrupt the whole point of WP:dispute resolution, which is to find shared principles, not merely express dissent. If this conduct were the subject of an ArbCom case, how would you determine whether there was any wrongdoing, and what might be a fair remedy? Shooterwalker (talk) 19:17, 22 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
A: I'd suggest you review the Gavin.collins case, then. It took years to proceed to that point, but this is a fairly recent case where the community patience was exhausted by an editor whose primary offense was simply refusing to accept consensus. It was frustrating for everyone involved, not only because Gavin failed to either modify his viewpoint or accept that consensus disagreed with him, but because it was apparent that Gavin sincerely believed in the correctness of his own position. The community is rightfully reluctant to exclude such individuals, because strength of conviction is generally a positive trait in a contributor, and all reasonable efforts should be taken to cajole such contributors into maintaining their convictions while accepting that consensus differs.

So, to answer the question: Not sure ArbCom intervention would be needed in such a case, but assuming for the sake of argument that we'd taken the case, I would want to see evidence of an appropriate level of failed efforts to reconcile such conduct with community consensus before sanctioning a good faith contributor without other conduct issues. Jclemens (talk) 20:36, 22 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Seems pretty clear. Thanks, and good luck. Shooterwalker (talk) 21:34, 22 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Question: Does someone who writes this have the disposition required to be a fair and judicious arbitrator? Explain why or why not. jps (talk) 23:11, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
A: "to hallucinate" is to perceive something which is not there. Were I talking to someone of only modest education likely to misconstrue the technical usage, I would avoid such phrasing, but WMC is not such a person. Jclemens (talk) 23:20, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Question from Offliner. Could you please give examples of non-trivial dispute resolution where you have participated? Which case took you the most time and effort? You say you have crafted a few topic bans - could you please give links to the relevant threads? Offliner (talk) 23:51, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
A: The most recent successful topic ban I crafted was here, as an outcome of my closure of the proximal RfC. I more recently crafted a topic ban proposal for Colonel Warden prior to blocking him. In both instances, as well as the ill-fated mentoring of Okip/Ikip, I have gravitated towards individuals who have alienated large groups of the community, tried to be as empathetic and supportive as possible, but not stood in the way of sanctions when they were clearly called for. Beyond that, I've done a good bit of third opinion work, but while that may have involved a bunch of work, it's all been in relatively trivial increments. I've intentionally stayed out of refereeing many-on-many disputes, which is what ArbCom tends to see, as the worth and effectiveness of a single administrator intervention has seemed quite limited. Jclemens (talk) 00:29, 1 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Question: I've assembled a set of questions for the 12 candidates listed here. The questions are intended to see how you would respond to situations you will probably encounter if elected. I've picked one question for each candidate listed at the link above; the other questions can be seen here. Please feel free to answer only the selected question below, or all of them if you chose. Your question is what would you do in the following situation?: "Voting on a remedy to ban someone is deadlocked and you have the casting vote". Carcharoth (talk) 05:32, 4 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
A:This would initially seem to be a particularly hard question to answer in the abstract. As you're well aware, the question doesn't seem to arise all that often. Looking at e.g. this, there's nothing remotely resembling contention in the voting on sanctions, only in the findings; in broad terms, for the sanctions to be contested, the findings would likely be moreso. If the ArbCom has done its job well, found its evidence, reaffirmed its principles, and discussed things appropriately, such a situation never need arise. While ArbCom decisions are phrased as votes, with majorities required to pass, any time that one ArbCom member has to cast a tiebreaking vote, consensus has not been developed--and that's not a way to run a consensus-based project. So, in such a case, all that I can tell about the situation is that the vote is premature and more fact finding or discussion is appropriate. The best next step, then is to counsel the other Arbs to take a step back and deliberate until an actual consensus becomes clear.

Oh, and if it came down to it, I'd always vote for the appropriate outcome based on the facts of the case. But that wasn't really the question, was it? Jclemens (talk) 07:10, 4 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
There are examples (I may point to them later), but your answer was excellent, thanks. I will say more on the talk page. Carcharoth (talk) 14:29, 4 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]