[WikiEN-l] MONGO and the ArbCom

Wed Dec 13 05:56:00 UTC 2006

On 12/12/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll be the first to agree that the actual arbitration finding texts
> are often poorly written and illconsidered, but that by no means
> causes the outcome of the decision to be invalid. You must consider
> the underlying evidence, just as the arbcom did before you can fairly
> comment.

This is definitely the case, and thank you for bringing that up.  We
have sometimes been poor at 'showing our working' - there is sometimes
(often?) a gap between the stated findings and the remedies.  The
arbitrators will easily take issue with findings or remedies that are
clearly not agreed upon, but sometimes it does not come quickly to
mind that B does not necessarily follow from A.

This is not, often, because we are off conspiring in some back room
deciding what to do, but simply because as Gregory says we are
reaching our conclusions about what should be done by reading directly
from the evidence, and possibly further research on our own, not from
only reading the findings.

We are also not some mechanical process of input the policy violations
here, apply some math, out come the remedies there.  In this, I feel,
we are attempting to follow Jimbo's way of running things pre-Arbcom -
that the final arbiter of things should not be a mechanical
application of rules but a human process of evaluating the thing as a
whole and trying to do the best thing for the project.  We are always
evaluating things in the light of someone's overall contribution and
behaviour, not just the behaviour brought to light in a specific case.

Some admins seem to want Arbcom decisions to be purely a mechanical
application of rules, purely based on the evidence set forth, and with
a very laid down set of penalties for various violations of the rules.
 I do not, personally, agree with that.

-Matt