Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-08-08/Arbitration report

The Arbitration Committee has negotiated an agreement to hopefully resolve a longstanding personal conflict that has cropped up in a variety of places on Wikipedia. While moving quickly on this situation, the arbitrators were steadily working on the remaining backlog of cases.

The case in question involved Everyking, based on a complaint by Snowspinner about his conduct on the administrators' noticeboard. Although the request for arbitration was framed in terms of Everyking attacking administrators generally, it seemed that the primary issue was that Everyking was criticizing Snowspinner in particular. The arbitrators thus undertook some private discussion with the parties and persuaded Everyking to agree that he would no longer make comments anywhere on Wikipedia about Snowspinner's actions. Everyking's ability to edit is not subject to any other restrictions.

The agreement does not have any particular enforcement provisions, other than the possibility of reopening the case if the agreement falls through. Everyking is allowed to "politely converse" with Snowspinner on either of their talk pages, and he is also free to submit a request for comment or a request for arbitration against Snowspinner if he wishes.

Other cases
One additional matter is apparently ready to be completed as four arbitrators have voted to close the case. This would lead to Cantus being banned from editing several pages due to "lengthy edit warring with respect to a number of articles". The pages in question are Developed country, Template:Europe, and Terri Schiavo. He could also be banned from additional pages if he exceeds a new revert parole, which would allow him only "one revert per article or other page per 30 day period." Cantus would then be subject to blocks of up to a week for editing articles from which he is banned, and if use of a sockpuppet to circumvent bans is verified, he could be blocked for a month.

Work on other cases has progressed to the point where the arbitrators are deliberating and voting on their rulings for all of their outstanding cases, other than one new case that was accepted during the week. This is in part due to the efforts of arbitrator Fred Bauder, who has frequently taken the lead in writing drafts of findings of fact and remedies for a case.

The new case is a request involving Gabrielsimon, which was opened even though the arbitrators were evenly split on whether to accept it. Initially five arbitrators had voted to reject the case, but after three others voted to accept, Theresa Knott concluded that there were continuing problems and changed her vote. Since opening a case under the arbitration policy is based only on votes to accept, the decision is not affected by the votes to reject.