Requests by contributors for arbitration by year on Wikipedia. (Data from Wikipedia.)
The number of formal administrative cases has dropped steadily over the years, reaching a level of about a dozen cases a year. Maybe these new arbitrators have as part of the objectives of their new initiatives a re-invigoration of the formal dispute process, which appears to be on the verge of irrelevancy to WP except for disputes among administrators themselves? Brews ohare (talk) 17:11, 13 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
By the formal dispute process, do you include formal mediation, requests for comment, and everything else that isn't talk page discussion? Anyway, if I understand you, I'm not sure how an arbitrator can compel the community to use the arbitration process more extensively. It's also rather unclear whether the proportion of arbitration cases that relate to content disputes alone has decreased; certainly, with (for instance) the pending Article titles and capitalisation and the recently-closed Muhammad images, much of our current caseload does not relate to administrator conduct at all. (The committee also does an inconceivable amount of work behind the scenes, not least of which is ban appeals, advanced permission management, tracking of serial sockers, and the many items relating to individual contributors that relate to private or personal information and evidence, but that's probably not relevant.) AGK[•]21:40, 13 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
By "formal dispute process" I meant the cases plotted in the chart and listed at Wikipedia. These cases, as I understand them, involve a rather complete discovery process, unlike less formal actions like those stemming from AN/I. My query was simply whether the "new angles" of new arbitrators mentioned in this Signpost article had perhaps some implications toward reversing the decline in the use of this process. Brews ohare (talk) 23:47, 13 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
