Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/Arbitration report

Arbitration report

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

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Checkuser and Oversight elections closed on the 15th. Former arbitrator Dmcdevit was reappointed as an Oversight and Checkuser. The appointment was a restoration of tools to an editor who had previously held them; it appears to have nothing to do with the aforementioned elections. The Committee formally deferred appointing a new IRC liaison; Wizardman was announced as the replacement of FT2 for this position a few weeks back, but the appointment was withdrawn. The Committee announced their proposal for a codified process of removing "advanced" user permissions. Significant opposition has arisen to the proposed process for emergency removals.

The Arbitration Committee neither opened nor closed any cases this week, leaving five open.

Evidence phase

SemBubenny: A case about the communication behavior of SemBubenny (formerly Mikkalai), and his use of administrator tools in disputed deletions.
Ayn Rand: A case about editorial behavior, such as alleged POV-pushing and bad faith, in relation to the Ayn Rand article. The Arbitration Committee accepted the case as they found that all other avenues of dispute resolution had failed to resolve the dispute.
Date delinking: A case regarding the behavior of editors in the ongoing dispute relating to policy on linking dates in articles. An injunction has been issued prohibiting large-scale linking or delinking of dates until the case is resolved.
Scientology: A case regarding behavioral problems in Scientology-related articles; the case is related to the prior case Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/COFS.

Voting

Fringe science: A case initially filed about the behavior of ScienceApologist, but opened to look at editing in the entire area of fringe science, and the behavior of editors who are involved in the area of dispute. In a proposed decision now being voted on by arbitrators, Coren has proposed the creation of a new type of arbitration remedy, "supervised editing", which an editor may be placed under when he or she does not "engage other editors or the editorial process appropriately". A designated supervisor would be permitted to revert or refactor the edits of the other editor at his or her discretion, ban the editor from articles, or require that the editor propose any substantial content edits to the supervisor, who will make the edits on his behalf. After the period of supervision terminates, the supervisor will submit a report to the committee who will revise the remedy that placed the editor under supervision. Other remedies include placing ScienceApologist under such supervision, restricting Martinphi from editing policy and guideline pages, admonishing Pcarbonn, and issuing general warnings to behave and seek mediation. Arbitrator voting is in progress.