Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-05-31/Arbitration report

Declined cases
Carmaker1 case was requested 17 April 2020; on 2 May.

Medicine
Medicine case


 * Workshop 12 May 2020
 * Proposed decision posted 26 May 2020

Last month, The Signpost stated "many of the workshop proposals appear to favor letting the editors solve the content dispute on their own." An unprecedented "topic moratorium" was by active Arbcom member.

One quarter of the twelve active arbitrators recused themselves: Casliber, DGG, and Newyorkbrad. Recusal is usually done when an arbitrator considers him- or herself unable to make an impartial decision, often due to closeness to the subject in either a positive or negative way, but there is no requirement to give a reason for recusal. The Signpost notes without comment that one of the involved parties,, was appointed as a community-selected Wikimedia Foundation trustee in August 2017.

Remedies proposed as of publication deadline include (reminders/admonishments have been omitted; a ✅ means the remedy has passed as of publication deadline):
 * New discretionary sanctions topic: pharmaceutical drug prices and pricing broadly construed ✅
 * Topic moratorium (applied to community): to include prices only after development of local consensus
 * Editing restriction (applied to Doc James): to not include prices in articles ✅
 * Topic ban (applied to QuackGuru): to not edit medicine articles ✅

Jytdog
Jytdog case
 * Closed 13 April 2020

Jytdog is indefinitely banned from the English Wikipedia. 11 yea, 0 nay (DGG recused). Issues identified in the findings include Jytdog's history of oversight blocks, Jytdog's other sanctions (two voluntary interaction restrictions/bans with another, and an indefinite topic ban), a history of edit warring and incivility, and uninvited off-wiki contact with another editor.

Amendment requests
Due to the inclusion of the Op-Ed "Where Is Political Bias Taking Us?" by, we are taking the unusual step of reviewing an amendment request from several months ago. American politics 2 (AP2) discretionary sanctions were taken up by Arbitration Committee in a December 2019 amendment request. It was the twelfth request for amendment or clarification and perhaps is of special importance during this U.S. election year. In the December request, Atsme objected to unilateral actions based on [a specific administrator's] customized DS which has lead to POV creep and specific DS for specific editors as he sees fit. He is micromanaging AP2 and controlling the narrative.

Atsme said this month (May) to the administrator who had applied the discretionary sanctions to them under the aegis of AP2 (which were in March), your response is why I have made it my mission to draw attention to the problems you and a few other admins have created with DS and AE, specifically unilateral actions, and the POV creep associated with sole discretion. Your response solidifies my position, and I will use it in my arguments until the community is aware of why this is an extremely important issue to the future of the project as it relates to maintaining NPOV, and the ability for editors to engage in discussions where the exchange of free thought and ideas is paramount. Other respondents at the December amendment request made observations about the expansion of DS to become "boutique" or "tailored" sanctions at the unreviewed discretion of a single administrator. Comments by two arbitrators either noted their own concerns or the concerns of others: DGG said Delegating [DS] to whatever one of the several hundred individual admins may choose to exercise their imagination is another matter entirely ... no one admin should repeatedly engage in arb enforcement on the same individual or take a disproportionate share for any large area, and GorillaWarfare said [T]his does not seem to be a great place to also address whether admins should be creating their own sets of custom sanctions for use in areas where discretionary sanctions have been authorized. However it does seem like it would be worth visiting that issue somewhere, since there seem to be many people who share concerns about them.

Terminlogy used in American politics 2 December 2019 amendment request
 * "boutique", "specialized", "customized", or "custom" discretionary sanctions

Quotes used in the amendment request:

Arbs Others
 * Delegating [DS] to whatever one of the several hundred individual admins may choose to exercise their imagination is another matter entirely ... no one admin should repeatedly engage in arb enforcement on the same individual or take a disproportionate share for any large area - DGG
 * [T]his does not seem to be a great place to also address whether admins should be creating their own sets of custom sanctions for use in areas where discretionary sanctions have been authorized. However it does seem like it would be worth visiting that issue somewhere, since there seem to be many people who share concerns about them. - GorillaWarfare
 * If the committee wants to consider [respondent]'s specialized DS, that should probably be a separate clarification request- Floqenbeam
 * [Complainant] may wish to consider posting another, separate, ARCA request about the special sanctions - Bishonen
 * ArbCom should look into how DS are being used - SashiRolls

Correction: The original headline made it appear that the Medicine'' case decision was closed. Currently the votes for an editing restriction on Doc James stand at 7-0, with 5 votes needed to pass, and the votes for closing the case at 2-0, with a net +4 needed to close. We regret the error.''