Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-12-01/Discussion report

MedCom closed
Wikipedians reached a consensus on the village pump to close the Mediation Committee and mark all its associated pages as historical. The closer,, pointed to the wide support of the proposer 's argument that MedCom's original purposes have been supplanted by (and are better served by) RfCs. WBG also pointed to MedCom being too opaque and bureaucratic in the eyes of many Wikipedians, and concluded that many of the "oppose" !votes were not sufficiently convincing when compared to the rebuttals. Alternative routes for content dispute resolution (as suggested by Dispute resolution requests as well as commenters in the discussion) include requests for comment and the dispute resolution noticeboard.

Admin controversies lead to new RfCs
Several admin accounts – some of which were largely inactive but stayed in compliance with the policy on removing inactive admins' tools – were recently compromised to insert vandalism into articles. This led to a proposal to tighten the policy on the policy village pump. The changes would remove the requirement that admins be notified before their mop is removed, as well as requiring that a logged action be made every 12 months to keep the bit, such as a block, deletion, or page protection; not just an edit. Both changes were proposed with the intention of discouraging admins from "holding on to the bit" despite not actively editing. These vandal attacks have led to a proposal on the Administrators' Noticeboard to temporarily restrict editing the main page to interface admins.

In other admin news, after a bureaucrat desysopped an admin who removed someone else's block of their account (see the arbitration report) and several compromised admin accounts unblocked themselves (resulting in global locks for the affected accounts), an RfC was created on the village pump about whether self-unblocking by admins should ever be permitted by technical means. In addition to an outright ban (option A) and the status quo of "admins are technically capable of self-unblocking but also see the policy for whether it's acceptable" (option C), another option was offered of bureaucrats being able to self-unblock but not other admins (option B). Four days after the RfC was created, developers implemented option A, though admins will still be able to remove blocks they made on themselves.

Other discussions this month

 * On WT:Bot policy: Should bot approval group members have an activity requirement à la admins?
 * On WT:Notability (people): A proposal for changes to notability criteria for deceased members of marginalized groups.
 * Wikipedia has a lot of short articles. One user,, created several of these articles, and started an RfC on whether they should be moved to draftspace.
 * On Meta, the Community Wishlist Survey 2019 is now open for voting closed. This is your chance to make your voice heard about what features the Wikimedia Foundation should implement on wikis. Check it out.
 * There's also some related controversy on how much canvassing on the proposals is acceptable; see RFC. Users over on Meta encourage it to some extent, but some EnWPans have become worried about spam on the village pumps.
 * This one's less of a discussion than a vote, but Arbitration Committee elections are going on now, so don't forget to vote if you're eligible.

Follow-ups

 * Page movers can now override the title blacklist, as determined by unanimous consensus at the village pump.
 * Consensus was reached on the village pump that today's featured articles should not be pending-changes protected, but that non-autoconfirmed users should be blocked from adding images.
 * Enough about mediation and wheel-warring, let's talk about something much more important: padlocks! Specifically, they have a new design. Enjoy!