Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-21/Arbitration report

A proposed decision has been posted in the Infoboxes case that includes statements on metadata and microformat issues. The Tea Party movement case continues, following a stalemate over the proposed decision.

Infoboxes
A proposed decision has been posted in the Infoboxes case. Arbitrators were quick to agree on the principle that global consensus “cannot be overruled by a local consensus” and a finding of fact that “the use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited” and therefore to be determined by local consensus at each individual article. Agreement on metadata was less quick. (See the extensive discussion of metadata issues at the evidence and evidence talk pages; see also microformat).

While there was general agreement that “Anyone may edit, use, modify and distribute the content for any purpose and the re-use of the information should be facilitated, where it is not detrimental to the encyclopedia,” a more narrowly tailored statement that “metadata aligns with the goals of the encyclopedia where it is not detrimental to our content or our scope” found less agreement, with concerns expressed over whether there had been sufficient community discussion to establish clear consensus, best practices, or guidelines for its use.

The case, brought by Ched, involves the issue of who should make the decision to include an infobox in an article and to determine its formatting, as well as what is perceived to be some editors' aggressive addition or reverting of infoboxes to articles without discussion.

Tea Party movement
The committee has now posted a “more traditional decision including specific findings and remedies against specific editors” after failing to reach an agreement on the original proposed decision and on a controversial “motion for final decision” that would have imposed a 6-month article/page ban on 14 editors from “editing the Tea Party movement article, the article talk page, and all subpages of the article and talk page”. (See the August 7 and August 14 arbitration reports). Findings of fact have been proposed for 9 editors (not including the proposer of the case). Remedies, including topic bans or restrictions, and two interaction bans, have been proposed for 11 editors. Two editors who have been proposed for sanctions have not yet had findings of fact posted.

Other requests and committee action

 * Clarification and amendment request: Argentine History (August 2013): A clarification and amendment request made by Lecen  was closed with an interaction ban between Cambalachero and Lecen, and MarshalN20 and Lecen.
 * Clarification request: Argentine History (August 2013): A request made by Cambalachero  for a clarification of whether a topic ban on pages related to the history of Latin America applies to articles about recent politics or a brief mention of historical context in non-historical articles was closed with the clarification that events after and including 1983 should not be an issue.