Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-01-31/Arbitration report

The Arbitration Committee closed their poll on Checkuser and Oversight Appointments; no resulting announcements have been made.

The Arbitration Committee closed no cases this week, and opened one, leaving a total of six cases open. Two motions were passed.

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 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. Proposed remedies that will extend and narrow PHG's current topic ban have the unanimous support of ten and twelve arbitrators, respectively.


 * 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.

Motions

 * Motion re Slimvirgin: This motion was amended, in two parts, by this motion. Pending the outcome of the current RfC on Arbitration Enforcement, the restriction provided in the first motion is clarified to apply only to restrictions placed by administrators on specific editors. The second amendment states that the general expectation of administrators to explain their actions and be available for discussion is not waived when performing administrator actions as Arbitration Enforcement.


 *  Motion re Bishzilla : This motion "strongly admonished Bishzilla for her conduct in the matter". Bishzilla is an alternate account of Bishonen, who had held for several months the administrator flag previously held by Bishonen; the flag has since been transferred back to the Bishonen account. Bishzilla had blocked then Arbitrator FT2 to force the issue on removing FT2 from the committee. FT2 later resigned from the committee.