Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-11-25/Arbitration report

For this week's Arbitration Report: another long-running case has been closed, while the voting process for this year's Arbitration Committee Elections has begun.

Palestine–Israel articles 3
On 22 November, a little under three months since it opened in late August, the Palestine–Israel articles 3 case has been closed. The case stemmed from a dispute in the topic-area of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; allegations of copyright violation were the proximate cause, along with sockpuppetry investigations, various ethnicity-related personal attacks, and the resultant noticeboard threads. Peace in the Middle East has been a long-standing problem in the real world, where tensions run especially high, even in comparison to the normally higher tensions that accompany discussion of political and religious views. Wikipedia is not immune to outside tensions being imported into on-wiki disputes, unfortunately. The strength of the Five Pillars is often tested in this particular topic-area, especially neutrality and civility, as the prior two ArbCom cases indicate.

The specifics of the initiation of this ArbCom case, ARBPIA3, were related to the use of administrative tools while blocked. There was a Level 1 emergency desysop, which one sitting arbitrator noted was an "extremely rare" procedure, on that specific basis. Although administrators are held to a higher standard with regard to civility and other behavioral criteria, the stated cause of the emergency desysop on 18 August was the tool use. The full ArbCom case, which was accepted, was explicitly of a scope not specific to the particulars of the events involving the small number of named parties, but rather "with the aim of reviewing... existing sanction provisions in the prior Palestine–Israel articles case" of 2009; later amended in 2011 (as well as here), and related motions were also passed in 2012.

The following remedies were the result of the ARBPIA3 case: The specific portion of the remedy which permits discretionary-sanctions reverts of new editors and new usernames (those who have been editing for less than one month and/or have fewer than 500 edits) was first utilized in summer 2015 during the GamerGate case, another topic-area which also involves high tensions and sockpuppetry. The handling of both these cases have been mentioned during the ongoing ArbCom election process.

Arbitration Committee Elections 2015 Voting
Table of the unofficial advertised voter-guides by individual wikipedians.

As we reported last week, there are 20 candidates in 2015, seeking to fill up to nine open seats on the Committee. The number of candidates is now at 20 after one editor announced their withdrawal from the election on 25 November. As the election must go on, on 23 November at 00:00 UTC, voting for the 2015 election began via Special:SecurePoll. Polls will remain open to eligible voters (currently unblocked usernames registered before 28 October with 150+ edits to mainspace before 1 November) through 6 December at 23:59 UTC.

More than 500 Wikipedians cast votes during the first 24 hours of polling, a figure which was markedly higher than in the previous year, and by 28 November over 2000 votes had been cast. Voter-participation in the 2014 ArbCom election was 593 legitimate non-duplicate ballots, lower than in previous years. After a series of discussions at WP:AN and User talk:Jimbo Wales, among other places, consensus developed that during 2015 elections a WP:MassMessage would be sent out to the roughly one hundred thousand eligible ArbCom voters, via their user talk pages. Election commissioner Mdann52 helped implement the actual message.

To learn more about the candidates, review their campaign-statements, which link to their contributions and other information about them. Questions for candidates are ongoing, and will continue throughout the voting-period. In addition, there are now more voter-guides than there are candidates; written by individual wikipedians, these guides provide arb-candidate criteria, and often specific support/oppose advice (see table at right), for editors unfamiliar with ArbCom, or unfamiliar with specific candidates. At least a dozen other candidate-analysis pieces have been published on-wiki, plus a special report last week in the Signpost.

As there has been one withdrawal since the voting began, and since candidates will continue to answer questions throughout the 6 December close of the SecurePoll, please note that voters "may revisit and change their decisions" by returning to the voting booth and re-entering their revised preferences. Finally, for technical reasons, voters should cast their vote by "an hour before the close of voting" or so, to ensure their vote will be counted.


 * Editor's note: In the interest of disclosure, one of the 20 candidates in the election is a co-editor-in-chief of the Signpost. They are temporarily inactive with regard to their election-related editorial duties at the Signpost and will remain so for at least the remaining duration of the election. As of 16 November, has taken the reins as sole editor-in-chief.