User:Kelly Martin/ArbComStatement
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- This statement, which is a draft, is being prepared for the purpose of my intended candidacy for the Arbitration Committee in the 2005 elections. Please leave any comments on the discussion page. Any inquiries should be directed to my user talk page or via email.
I've been here just under a year, and an admin since June (appointed as such in a nearly unanimous RfA). Many of you probably know me better from IRC than from my relatively uninteresting edit history on the wiki. I'm running for ArbCom in part because I have been asked to consider running by people whose opinions I trust, and in part because I think I'd be good at it. I've talked about the possibility of running for ArbCom with a number of people and have received a number of statements of support.
I'm not very focused on rules. Yes, I went to law school, and I learned all about rules and how to interpret them and apply them and bend them and twist them until they no longer resembled what they were intended to do. ArbCom shouldn't be tied down to a bunch of staid hardline policies. Our goal here isn't to implement a legal system. It's to write an encyclopedia. People who interfere with that need to be convinced to stop. By increasingly strong force, if necessary, until they do actually stop. ArbCom is the entity that decides how to apply force, in those situations when the community can't decide on its own what to do, but something has to be done anyway. ArbCom has to use common sense, not legalism, in deciding when to apply force, and how.
I'm not fond of blocks and bans (with one major exception, and it doesn't involve the ArbCom: copyright infringement). I would only ban people when no lesser remedy is working; I'd much prefer to use mentoring, topical bans, or other conduct restrictions enforced with short-term blocks, than hard bans. I also would prefer to give people hauled up to ArbCom the chance to adjust their behavior; if they don't, the community (or the ArbCom, only when absolutely necessary) can then ban them. I feel that bans imposed by ArbCom lack the legitimacy of bans imposed by the community and would prefer that hard, general bans be imposed by the community instead of by ArbCom.
