Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Marudubshinki/Proposed decision

Prohibited entirely from running a bot?
Surely the decision of whether Maru can run any given bot should be up to the existing bot approvals process, no? If he runs an unauthorized bot, of course, block him. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:14, 10 September 2006 (UTC)


 * If an editor's past behavior has caused a lot of problems for everybody, the Arbitration Committee possesses the power to say "no more." It is of course appropriate to debate the wisdom of saying that, if it might be against the interests of Wikipedia. --Tony Sidaway 02:17, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree that this user has been disruptive with his bots, and normally it's the ArbCom's role to stop such a user from causing further disruption. In the very specific case of bots, however, there's a separate committee set up to prevent disruption of this very specific sort, and it would be best in general to leave decisions on this very specific issue to that committee, which is set up to handle them and can work more efficiently on them (e.g., much faster response times).  Marudubshinki has said that he didn't bother going through the approval process because he was impatient with it; he's perfectly capable of writing useful bots, I expect, and provided he's forced to go through approval for them, I expect his bots could in fact prove useful to Wikipedia. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:05, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Aside from the question of whether bot issues should be dealt with by us (I don't see why not), your point that approved bots could still be useful to Wikipedia is well-taken. This is the intended purpose of my alternate proposal. It's just up to the rest of arbcom to decide now. Dmcdevit·t 02:20, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Ultimately, the "bot committee" referred to above was created, at the time, as a group of users who knew the various ins and outs and nuances of operating a bot, and who offered to weigh up whether or not a bot sounded sane; the community, of course, retained a full check on this, and had the final power of review through consensus. It is policy, like it or not, that the Arbitration Committee have the power to ban users/accounts in order to protect the project from harm, be this political or technical, therefore, the loose group of users who've agreed to give most bot requests a quick eyeball, as it were, ought to (and, given that they're all sane and decent users, almost certainly would) defer to the Arbitrators in this matter.

Ultimately, the actions here violated two explicit policies which are established on this, and many other projects, for the sake of protecting the content; the content being the product of this site, and the most precious part of it, they were unacceptable. Whether or not Marudubshinki's actions did damage the content of this site is of relevance to this case; arguably, they did not, and arguably, in some cases, they did.

Another issue that needs to be examined, of course, is that of Marudubshinki's self-unblock, and the alleged block evasion; this saddens me, since I know Maru is a decent bloke at heart, and a damn good user and administrator, and I would have thought him far above any trace of wheel warring. I think it's quite a shame to have to remove his sysop tools and his bot flag from him, but it's not, ultimately, my decision. 164.11.204.52 22:23, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Note to arbitrators
Maru has belatedly posted to the Evidence page. This occurred after Fred had formulated his draft of the Proposed Decision. I am not suggesting that anything in Maru's evidence either should or should not change the decision, but I wanted to make sure the arbs didn't miss it, either. Newyorkbrad 03:17, 11 September 2006 (UTC)