User:Alexia Death/Community Court for community issues

Preamble

At this moment WP:CIVIL, WP:HARASS and WP:NPA are polices practically never enforced in cases that are not as obvious as "You F***ing Asshole!" and going around blindly reverting others in cases where offenders are newbies. This has created a situation when these policies are not enforced enough and issues like this never get the community evaluation they need damaging the working environment in Wikipedia and resulting in contributors leaving. AN/I is a bad place for these problems, because heated debates disrupt the normal work flow. Arbitration only handles the severest of cases where serious intervention is needed, Requests for Comment do not offer a decision of any kind, they are just comments and getting a RfC certified when you are being harassed by an individual or a group is nearly impossible. People with these problems have nowhere to go with their problems where in most cases a simple binding community judgment of what is appropriate or inappropriate is enough. And so they end up leaving the project. Community sanctions do not fill this void either, because as a result of that another editor is driven away. This is not the desired outcome. The desired outcome is to get people that need clear boundaries to acknowledge and be aware of them so policies would be adhered to.

Community Court so community rules on community issues

What I propose is a Community Court. A place for requesting and receiving such a judgment on whether this particular incident is condemned or not, and a reaction based on this move.

The process

The process would be similar to an AfD, but to avoid flaming debates that lead to more issues and accusations, it must have a strict protocol.

The process could be as follows:

1) The motioning party fills out a template, detailing the issue and the accused party or parties.

2) The motioning party notifies the accused parties and posts diffs of notifications to show that they are aware of the proceedings. The motion is listed as case waiting for a judge and open for comment relying on clerks to enforce the protocol.

3) When an admin takes up the case, all parties are notified that they have one day to post their objections to this particular admin as Judge. If there are no objections, the case is listed as a ruled case.

3a) If there are objections the Judge has the opportunity to reply and another neutral admin has to either confirm or invalidate the objections. If the approval of a judge fails on three accounts case is listed as unruled case open for comment and recommendations for five days and archived afterwards by the last confirming admin. Unruled case follows the same strict rules as a ruled case would. If the admins were all dismissed on obvious neutrality grounds their reasons for volunteering may be taken up in their admin review.

5) Case is listed for community input at least five days after a Judge is confirmed or case listed as unruled.

6) Judge closes ruled cases 5 days after being confirmed using community input to rule Guilty, Not Guilty or Inconclusive and enforce an appropriate sanction. Ruling is not a vote count and the Judge must write a summary of the reasoning.

6a) Unruled cases are closed without judgment after 5 days of failure to enlist a Judge but can be referred to in case of later cases.

Protocol restrictions

• No threading
• Each person is entitled to only one strictly on topic opinion with Guilty, Not Guilty or Inconclusive limited in size.
• No further accusations unrelated to the case

Sanctions

Sanctions in these case should be very mild but marking. In mildest cases an official talk page warning is sufficient just to let the offender know the community will. If a person already has a warning and has not learned from it the a short block may be in order, just to leave a mark in this editors block log as a mark in permanent record to help in identifying pattern offenders. The blocks enforced can be as short as 1 hour and be maximally 12 hours long. these blocks are not enforced to stop the person from contributing, they are enforced to make this person seriously consider the implications of their actions.

Summary

This Community Court as envisioned would offer relief and clarity to editors that would otherwise leave the project disgusted by the environment here. It would make pattern offenders harder to hide their deeds and provide an appropriate venue to discuss and evaluate these issues separate of who commits them effectively stopping the deterioration of relations at its root, avoiding encampment and lessening the arbitrators workload. It would provide a "case law" of what is considered appropriate and what is not and would very much be in the interests of the community as a whole.

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Footnote:As always this essay is open for discussion in its talk. If you develop this idea in your own essay please make a proper Wiki link back here and perhaps let me know in my talk what you are doing.