Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015/Candidates/Hullaballoo Wolfowitz/Statement

Hullaballoo Wolfowitz

Have you ever seen the 1980 news video where George HW Bush, having just beaten Bob Dole in a presidential primary via vicious negative advertising, turns around and is slick and friendly to Dole? Dole replies "Stop lying about my record". Well, I'm (metaphorically) grumpy old Bob Dole.

Between en-wiki and Commons, I have roughly 75,000 edits. I have been editing regularly since late 2008. I have engaged regularly with difficult and (occasionally) destructive editors, in order to enforce important Wikipedia policies, particularly BLP and copyright policies. I was one of the editors who raised warning signals about Qworty (but was unfortunately ignored), whose editing led to one of Wikipedia's worst public embarassments. I also was one of the first editors to object to the Committee's astonishingly insensitive proposed directive indicating female editors should not fight back actively against sexual harassment

I have had extensive real-world experience with lower-level government agencies, particularly citizen boards which are tasked with resolving issues on matters of public interest and import. Very few ArbCom members, past or present, have claimed such experience, which may be one reason for the Committee's dysfunctionality.

Arbcom is inefficient and ineffective. It needs to resolve disputes more rapidly and more clearly, rather than trotting out a standard list of fossilized bromides. It has adopted procedures which incorporate time- and effort-wasting elements of the legal process without adopting procedures which promote efficiency, fairness, and good decisionmaking.

If elected to Arbcom, I will immediately propose, as a first step, that when a case is accepted, the Committee provide a clear statement of which matters it intends to address in that case. That will do much to eliminate the absurd waste of community time and effort when amorphous cases turn into free-fire zones and timesinks, both in evidence and workshop pages. I also believe far more discussion should take place in public.

Mandatory: Before accepting any advanced permissions accompany the position, I will comply with WMF requirements. I edit primarily as Hullaballoo Wolfowitz, but my Commons account, created prior to unification, is The Big Bad Wolfowitz, and I continue to use that ID for work involving free images. Sometimes wires get crossed, and the "wrong" account makes an edit regarding a particular image. My enwiki account was originally named Harmonica Wolfowitz.

• Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk · contribs · count · logs · target logs · block log · lu · rfa · rfb · arb · rfc · lta · checkuser · socks · rights · blocks · protects · deletions · moves)