Most of this was written 25 November 2015. I've started to provide nutshell summaries (one section so far) in a first step toward compression to a "PowerPoint" version, and have also updated some passages to reflect post-2015 happenings. Timestamp of my most recent substantive update to this review essay: — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:11, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
Feel free to suggest updates, additions, corrections, etc. on the talk page.
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- I am not an admin and have no interest in being one.
- I have no problem with admins as a group.
- There are a few admins who badly need desysopping, and I'm not going to pretend I don't think so. The main category of them in my experience are misusers of DS to supervote against consensus in policy debates.
- I am not an Arbitrator. I ran at the end of 2017, and missed election by less than 3%, despite having more support votes than over 50% of those who were elected. Our ArbCom voting system is clearly broken. I decided to run for election again, in December 2020, with DS reform being an explicit goal of my tenure; aside from there being too few candidates in that election for the available seats, my main motivation for running again is the number of other sitting Arbs and candidates for ArbCom who also want to overhaul or end DS.
- I have no issue with ArbCom existing, only with it not doing what it was created for, or doing it well.
- In all honesty, my opinion of the last two batches of Arbs is an order of magnitude higher than that of the bulk of the several previous incarnations. However, the recent and current Arbs have not fixed the problems created by their predecessors, and this has to change.
- I have been previously subject to discretionary sanctions several times (all under WP:ARBATC).
- I would contest all of them as over-reactive and not justifiable; they were clearly not proportionate nor preventative, but punitive, which is against policy.
- The two times I've bothered with the enormous hassle of appealing them, I've been successful in doing so (in one case despite extreme stonewalling by both AE admins and ArbCom itself). No one should ever have to go through such a wringer again. Reforming appeal procedures will also be in my next Arbcom election platform.
- I do not believe that DS should be applied in the WP:ARBATC case (WP:AT and WP:MOS), because it interferes directly with WP's ability to self-govern and to maintain policy/guideline stability.
- I do support DS (or something like it, e.g. community general sanctions) applying when necessary to loci of disputes over public-facing encyclopedic content.
- But they are applied more often then necessary, enforced one-sidedly as supervoting, and for the most part not applied where most needed.
- As detailed below, the system is badly broken in other ways.
- My educational background is in cultural anthropology, linguistics, and technical writing; my professional one in political science, policy analysis, non-profit administration, communications, and IT.
- Except for the last point, this puts me in an unusually good position to do this kind of analysis.
- So does having been here for 15+ years, as one of the 400 most active editors of all time (even after taking a year off), and by far one of the most active developers and stewards of policies and guidelines.
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