Guild Wars Wiki talk:Elections/2007-08 bureaucrat election/Tanetris

go Tanetris! =]--Insane Maestro 14:08, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

An optional question for the candidate: What main factors would you use in deciding whether or not to accept a case for arbitration? --Rezyk 01:14, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

An excellent question! As I see it, there are two primary criteria to examine for a case to be accepted for arbitration: necessity and appropriateness. The question of necessity is fairly obvious: is arbitration the only way to resolve the dispute? If there remains a reasonable, even if slim, possibility that the community will work the problem out on its own without ArbComm intervention, then it isn't time for ArbComm to take the case until that possibility is exhausted.

Equally important is whether or not the matter really falls within the scope of what ArbComm is set up to handle. Obviously, if the dispute actually boils down to a wiki content issue, either the case would need to be declined outright, or it would need to be handled very carefully to be sure that a decision made on the users would not become a de facto decision on the content, depending on the situation. It would be rather handy if we had an actual GWW:ARBCOMM page to outline at least guidelines of what the community expects ArbComm's scope to be, but as I cannot look into the future to see what may wind up on that page, until then I would mostly be going by my personal understanding of what it is (arbitrate users, not pages) and the community's statements at the time of the request.

Obviously other factors may go into a particular acceptance or declination for arbitration, as each situation is different, but I think the first questions that need to be answered are "Is it necessary?" and "Is it appropriate?" and go from there. These are admittedly both rather subjective questions, each with a pretty large area of maybes between the yeses and the nos. My default would lean toward no until convinced otherwise, though of course open to such convincing.

I will say that I cannot think of a problem that the community would not be able to resolve without intervention and which wouldn't fall within the scope of the sysops. That's not to say it's impossible or that I would turn aside all ArbComm requests out of hand: sooner or later something will crop up that requires such arbitration. I just can't imagine the situation it might be. I suspect I'm not alone in this and that that's at least part of the reason no GWW:ARBCOMM page exists so far. It's hard to plan for something you can't really predict.

Hope I answered your question. Follow-up and/or other questions welcome. - Tanetris 16:31, 15 August 2007 (UTC)