Arbitration Report

The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving two open.

Open cases

Climate change (Week 7): Special rules of conduct were put in place for this arbitration. The case resulted from the merging of several Arbitration requests on the same topic matter into a single case, and the failure of a related request for comment to make headway. Although the case is still technically open, the workshop phase has been closed to give a break to all participants while arbitrators think about a proposed decision.

Race and intelligence (Week 8): This case concerns accusations of incivility, disruptive editing, and tag-teaming to control the content on articles related to race and intelligence. Following a number of delays (see Signpost coverage from June 28, July 5, July 12), the case moved to the proposed decision phase. The proposed decision that was drafted by Coren has sparked several concerns among participants and non-participants. After last week's Signpost was published, Signpost readers have also made on-wiki comments about the proposed resolution of the case (example). The case remains in the proposed decision phase.

Motion

Eastern European mailing list: A motion was passed: the case remedy that banned Miacek from the Eastern Europe topic was lifted.

Other

The Committee took the unusual step of posting a statement regarding an unsuccessful ban appeal earlier this week, but explained that it was taken in this case because the text of the email appeal was "publicly posted...on an external website" by the subject, Ottava Rima, and because "multiple editors have posted on Ottava Rima's talk page" in relation to the same ban.
The statement on the ban appeal by Ottava Rima provided background surrounding the original case findings and remedies, separate remedies imposed at other Wikimedia Foundation projects close to the date of the ban appeal, Ottava Rima's "correspondence" with the Committee, as well as the focus of his appeal. The statement also provided the decision which "denied" Ottava Rima's ban appeal on the grounds that "he has not yet come to understand the collaborative nature of this project"; this outcome means that the next possible unban request may not be made earlier than 15 January 2011. The last part of the statement, which concerned the act of importing content written by banned users, was clarified by an arbitrator: "ArbCom isn't making any comment on how to transfer in content beyond what already exists in policy, we're just saying that we don't consider legitimately importing content written by a banned editor to be the same thing as proxying for a banned editor."

Note: Last week's Arbitration report coverage of ArbCom announcements regarding the selection of CheckUser and Oversight candidates has drawn some concern by FT2, who provided a reworded version. Here, both versions can be compared. As always, readers are welcome to leave informed comments about the Signpost's coverage and to express their general expectations of the Signpost.