Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-06/Arbitration report

No pending cases
The closure of Fæ two weeks ago marked the closure of the last open case before the Committee. This has only happened on three occasions: in 2009, 2010 and in May of this year. At the time of writing, the Committee has no requests for arbitration before it.

Arbitration cases do not form all of the Committee's workload, however, as two requests for clarification and one request for amendment are being discussed.

Motion on annotating changed usernames in arbitration decisions
Arbitrator Kirill Lokshin proposed a motion for a procedure on the alteration of an editor's previous username(s) in arbitration decisions to reflect their name change(s). Any instances appearing within the:
 * enforcement log may be updated by any uninvolved administrator on request;
 * text of a finding or remedy may be updated by the clerks on request; and
 * evidence submissions of a case or other preliminary documents may be updated by the clerks with the committee's prior approval.

A significant body of arbitrators have opposed the motion labelling the motion's stipulations "dogmatic and inflexible" and "administration creep". Arbitrator Elen of the Roads proposed making it a policy that clerks update records upon being made aware of a name change. Concerns about such a move would then be raised to the Committee accordingly. The suggested change to the motion also requires the editor-in-question to inform the Committee beforehand.

Race and intelligence amendment request
The Devil's Advocate initiated an amendment request for the controversial Race and intelligence case. The request calls for the amendment of review remedies 1.1, 6.1 and 7.1.

Amendment 1 concerns 6.1 and 7.1; calls for the modification of SightWatcher's and TrevelyanL85A2's indefinite omni-namespace edit and discussion ban from Race and intelligence topics, including participation in discussions concerning topic-editor conduct, to be a standard topic ban from Race and intelligence-related edits (broadly construed) with a clearly-defined route for appeal of the sanction.

Amendment 2 concerns 1.1; calls for the modification of Mathsci's admonishment for engaging in battlefield conduct to include an explicit warning that further battleground conduct (towards editors) related to the topic will be "cause for discretionary sanctions."