User:Bri/Signpost draft 0

, a Wikipedian since 2006, was indefinitely blocked by the Arbitration Committee on September 2. ArbCom member, writing for the committee, and announcing closure of an 18 August 2019 request for an Arbcom case, "The Arbitration Committee has been made aware of and has independently confirmed that Eric Corbett, since his public retirement, has been abusively misusing multiple accounts and disruptively editing while logged out. Eric Corbett's accounts are hereby indefinitely blocked by the Arbitration Committee."

Apparently following banning policy, ten minutes after ArbCom's decision was posted, English Wikipedia administrator  that would notify the community of the block. A flurry of edits by others ensued, both administrators and non-administrators. First, several more add/removes of the templates (without stated policy basis), and one final. After this, on October 9, administrator finally removed the templates and with the edit summary "busybodies", protected the userpage from editing. Contacted by The Signpost, Floquenbeam gave this explanation: That was a controversial tagging, which was edit warred over last month. It had died down and was quiet for quite a while [...] But now no more drive by shit stirring can happen.

Corbett's name appears frequently in The Signpost's archives including October 28, 2015 Arbitration report and December 30, 2015 Arbitration report; the latter detailing an administrator's privileges being removed by the Arbitration Committee due to actions related to Corbett. Our December 10, 2014 In the media report quoted an author in Slate who had described Corbett as one of "The Unblockables", a class of abrasive editors who can get away with murder because they have enough of a fan club within Wikipedia, so any complaint made against them would be met with hostility and opprobrium.