Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Party Guide/Introduction to cases

Overview of cases
If a request for arbitration is accepted, and an arbitration case is opened, a series of pages will be created. On these pages, editors will be able to post, update, and otherwise edit their Evidence as well as provide their own notes on others' comments. They may also take part in the Workshop, a structured consideration of the case open to the community, including Involved Parties and Arbitrators. Finally, they may submit questions on the relevant Talk pages.

To facilitate efficient case processing, the Committee designate one or more arbitrators to be the drafting arbitrator(s) or drafter(s) for the case. The drafter(s) will take a leading role in the management of a case, such as deciding specific standards of conduct, adding or removing parties, and granting extensions to word limits. The drafter(s) will also author the proposed decision (link to PD guide here) for the case. Other members of the Committee will then vote on the proposals, and, if they wish, propose alternatives or additions to the decision.

The clerks, in partnership with the drafter(s), are responsible for managing conduct on case pages. They may remove, hat or refactor posts from parties and non-parties. The clerks may also warn editors regarding unacceptable behaviour during the case, and, if the misconduct continues, impose sanctions (such as banning editors from the case pages) or block them from editing. If you wish to report misconduct or inappropriate posts to the clerks you should leave a message on the clerks' noticeboard to email the clerks (

Navigation template
To help parties and editors, a template will be included on each page of the case providing links to the pages of the case, the target dates for when each part of the case will happen (e.g. when the evidence phase is scheduled to be closed), and who the case clerk and drafter(s) are. Often times there will be an official "scope" listed in this box as well. This scope is used to determine which evidence the Arbitration Committee will and won't accept.

Differences between a case and a trial
Some distinctions between this and trials in western democratic systems, include the fact that there can be more than two sides, the expectation is that people represent themselves, and past cases don't form a binding precedent. Interested parties can also give input into the resolution, both by proposing it (at the workshop), and commenting on it before it is enacted (at the proposed decision).

Participation
There are many opinions among Wikipedians about whether parties to a case, especially parties who are the focus of a case, should participate in the case. Because misbehavior at a case is spoken about more clearly and prominently than when Arbs give credit for positive behavior at a case it can create a misleading impression of how often each happens.

Parties who help themselves during a case do this in a number of ways including:


 * Keeping calm - a case is a stressful situation and so Arbs take it as a good sign that even when things get hard, a party is able to deal with it calmly
 * Displaying a "problem solving" attitude
 * Use appropriately descriptive, rather than hyperbolic, language to allege misconduct and backing those allegations in the form of evidence, such as diffs - for instance calling a something "a single talk page message after being asked not to leave any more" rather than "the editor harassed me on my talk page despite knowing better"
 * Following the rules - an example is asking for an extension before going over word limits
 * Being concise and making it clear for arbitrators about what behavior and what policies are or aren't problematic - thirty words and five well-chosen diffs may make more of an impact than a 500-word exhaustive examination

Parties who find their behavior during a case used against them will have done the opposite of one or more of the behaviors above, most commonly failing to keep calm or otherwise engaging in conflict with other parties.

Case variations
The drafter(s) can make changes in order to best handle a particular case. Some of the more common variations are listed below, but other variations may also occur.

No workshop
The most common variation is to skip the Workshop phase of a case. When this happens the analysis phase will sometimes remain a separate phase and sometimes will be merged with the evidence phase.

Parties added during a case
Sometimes it becomes clear as evidence is presented that the parties initially listed in a case do not represent all the editors who are actually party to the dispute. When this happens an editor may be added as a party to the case after it has opened. While this does not mean that the editor has done anything wrong, it does mean that there is already evidence of the added party's involvement in the dispute. Normally when a party is added, the evidence phase will be extended to give the added party the same minimum amount of time for evidence (normally two weeks) that had originally been planned. In some situations, the committee may know from the case request that the parties list is incomplete and so they may give a set period of time (normally 1 week) during which editors may provide evidence about who the other parties to the dispute are.

Two stages for the evidence phase
For cases with larger scopes, sometimes the evidence phase will be broken into two stages. When this happen it generally means that during the first stage all evidence with-in the scope of the case will be accepted, there will then be a pause to allow arbitrators to examine the evidence already submitted, and a second stage where editors may post "rebuttal" evidence to evidence from the first stage or post evidence in response to requests or questions from arbitrators.

Private evidence accepted
Normally, only on-wiki evidence will be accepted during a public case. If private information is involved, the committee will often handle it privately. In unusual circumstances, the committee may decide to accept private evidence even while conducting a public case. This normally happens when there is sufficient on-wiki evidence of misconduct to allow a case but also off-wiki evidence not allowed to be presented publicly under Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Traditionally, in these kinds of cases the Arbitration Committee will, when the evidence phase closes, submit some kind of note or summary about the private evidence and include anonymized links to any on-wiki evidence noted in the private submission (example).

Temporary injunctions
The arbitrators may feel that it is in the best interests of the encyclopedia (to prevent further disruption and maintain decorum) to prevent the participants temporarily from continuing the disputed conduct until the case is concluded. Temporary injunctions do not necessarily foretell the outcome of the case.