Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-01-24/Arbitration report

The Arbitration Committee has released their near-term agenda. Key points include: opening, per their ruling in this case, a Requests for Comment on Arbitration Enforcement (which has since been opened here); appointing new Checkuser and Oversight operators, under a new system to be created pursuant to reactions to this page; formalizing case acceptance and recusal standards; and establishing a system for emergency removal of user rights, along with an Arbitrator recall system. They also announced a new mailing list structure, as detailed here.

The Arbitration Committee closed no cases this week, and opened one, leaving a total of five cases open.

Evidence phase

 * 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 Requests for arbitration/COFS.

Voting

 * PHG: A case brought by PHG, in a follow up to a prior case against PHG, Franco-Mongol alliance. This case will review PHG's editing since the prior case, and may impose new sanctions, or repeal current sanctions, as necessary.


 * 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 said 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.