The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Miscellaneous developments

The Committee has affirmed by motion its standard operating procedure on CheckUser and Oversight permissions: CUs and OSs who do not use their tools for more than twelve months will have access to the tool/s and to the associated mailing list(s) removed; for arbitrators, the twelve-month inactivity clock starts on the day they leave office. (read more)

Arbitrator Sam Blacketer resigned from the Committee on 23 May by posting an open e-mail (sent to arbcom-l on 20 February) on his userpage and by posting the following announcement on the Committee noticeboard:

"Some months ago I decided to resign from the committee and return to article editing, notifying the committee privately on 20 February. That resignation now takes effect. Before joining the committee I had used the account Fys for editing which should have been disclosed." (Full notice.)

It was discovered at the same time that Sam had not disclosed the fact that he had previously edited under Fys (talk · contribs), an account desysopped for abuse of administrator functions, poor judgement, and edit warring by the Arbitration Committee in the Irishpunktom arbitration case.

The Committee released a statement yesterday morning (24 May 2009 (UTC)) on the matter, which indicated that it has removed Sam from the arbcom-l and functionaries-en mailing lists and that the "status of his adminship will be decided within the next 24 hours." Discussion is unfolding at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard.

The Arbitration Committee opened two cases and closed one this week, leaving eight open.

Evidence phase

A Man In Black: A case brought to examine the conduct of administrator A Man In Black.

ADHD: A case examining the dispute on the ADHD article and the conduct of the editors involved therein.

Mattisse: A case—brought when a recent Request for Comment failed to abate concerns regarding her behaviour—examining the conduct of User:Mattisse.

Tang Dynasty: A case about editing conflicts on Inner Asia during the Tang Dynasty.

Obama articles: A case opened to review behavior of editors of articles related to Barack Obama.

Voting

Macedonia 2: A case about naming disputes at the Macedonia article, and ChrisO's use of administrator tools in the dispute. Thirty-eight remedies have been proposed, most of which sanction editors involved in the dispute.

Date delinking: A case regarding the behavior of editors in the ongoing dispute relating to policy on linking dates in articles. An injunction has been issued prohibiting large-scale linking or delinking of dates until the case is resolved. Over 130 proposals have been presented, including remedies which restrict, ban, topic ban, or admonish certain parties. The case has only recently entered voting, and so none of the proposals presently pass.

Scientology: A case regarding behavioral problems in Scientology-related articles; the case is related to the prior case, COFS. Thirty-four remedies have been proposed.

Motion to close

There are presently no case with an active motion to close.

Recently closed

Ryulong: A case regarding Ryulong's use of his administrator tools. For misuse of his administrative tools, failure to address the community's concerns, and inappropriate off-wiki behavior, Ryulong is desysopped. Mythdon is: restricted and placed under mentorship for a period of 1 year; admonished for on- and off-wiki harassment; and directed to refrain from contacting Ryulong off-wiki and from seeking Ryulong's identity on- and off-wiki. All participants of WikiProject Tokusatsu are advised to work on producing a genuine guideline for the articles falling under the scope of the WikiProject, and are urged to work in collaboration with Mythdon while seeking outside advice and help.

Abd and JzG: A case brought regarding a dispute between Abd and JzG about the latter's use of administrative tools on Cold fusion. The Committee held that JzG is not an uninvolved administrator with respect to cold fusion articles, and admonished him to not use his administrator tools in any situation he is involved in. The Committee urged Abd to heed good-faith feedback when handling disputes, to incorporate that feedback, and to clearly and succinctly document previous and current attempts at resolution of the dispute before escalating to the next stage of dispute resolution; and advised Abd to heed good-faith feedback when handling disputes and to incorporate that feedback.

West Bank - Judea and Samaria: A dispute about editor behavior in discussions about naming conventions for certain Israel- and Palestine-related locations. The following users are banned from editing any Arab-Israeli conflict-related article/talk page or discussing the dispute anywhere else on the project: Canadian Monkey, G-Dett, Jayjg, MeteorMaker, Nickhh, Nishidani, NoCal100, and Pedrito. The Committee stripped Jayjg of his status as a functionary and of all associated privileged access, including the CheckUser and Oversight tools and subscription to the checkuser-l, oversight-l, and functionaries-en mailing lists.

Aitias: A case regarding Aitias's use of his administrator tools. The suspension of Aitias's adminship—which had been in effect since a motion passed before the case was opened—was lifted (and Aitias is free to request at any time that a bureaucrat restore his tools). Aitias is admonished for inappropriate and unnecessarily sarcastic comments and is banned from Requests for rollback and its talk page for six months.