Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015/Candidates/Kevin Gorman/Statement

Kevin Gorman[edit]

I’m Kevin Gorman, frequent editor since 2011, and admin since the beginning of 2014. I’m also the former Wikipedian-in-Residence at UC Berkeley, moderator of the gendergap-l listserve, and frequent badgerer of PR blackhats. At the beginning of 2015, I went into severe septic shock, had several organ systems fail, and spent most of 2015 recovering from it - and within the last few months am to the point where I’m recovered enough for a full time workload, and have my health well-controlled. However, I may die in July 2016 so if elected, I will be serving most of my term from heaven.

I know it’s unusual for someone with a recent editing gap to run for AC, and I hadn’t intended to run - but some recent arbcom decisions, combined with concern over lack of candidates interested in actively guiding arbcom decisions towards increasing the health and continuing the growth of ENWP (and its active editing community,) combined with a little bit of prodding from a few other people made me change my mind. A longer statement about some of the problems I see with arbcom in the recent past can be seen here - but the short version is that I believe arbcom needs to be simplified, act faster than it currently does, and take more decisive action when confronted with an intractable issue, because failing to do so allows the problem to continue to fester and harm the community.

Arbcom should act as rarely as it can. When it does act, it should act quickly, transparently, and to the most significant extent possible aiming to support a collegial encyclopedia with an environment as conducive to creating content on the widest variety of encyclopedic topics as possible. Arbcom shouldn’t act punitively for the sake of acting punitively, although in support of content creation and our continued health as a community there will be times when community members must be desysopped, removed from a particular area, or removed from our community as a whole in order to strengthen the encyclopedia and our community.

It concerns me greatly that every study conducted on the English Wikipedia’s demographics has found that the vast majority of our editors are men, generally well-educated, generally fairly-well off, and almost entirely from the Global North. Our encyclopedia aims to encompass the sum of all human knowledge - a lofty goal that we cannot possibly accomplish unless we take steps to ensure that, to borrow from a recent public comment, we’re sending no demographic into a cultural buzzsaw.

I have already identified myself to the Wikimedia Foundation (although am willing to do so again if needed,) and have no issue signing an NDA. Wikipedia has made me sick over the last few years (literally). It's time that patient Kevin finds a cure for Wikipedia and his disease which is the same thing: ME.

Arbitration Committee Election 2015 candidate: Kevin Gorman