The Tides of March at ARBCOM

Arbitration report

The Tides of March at ARBCOM

While active, the ARBCOM proceedings have been more civil than certain historical events which also occured in March, all things considered.

After a fairly tame February, ARBCOM had a lot on its plate this month. Here are the highlights from March.

Amendment/clarification requests

India-Pakistan: An amendment request related to the topic ban of SheriffIsInTown has been made.
Gun control: A clarification request about when/if deletion constitutes acceptable arbitration enforcement under discretionary sanctions has been made.
Genetically modified organisms: A clarification request related to the scope of discretionary sanctions has been made.

Case requests

Wikipedia portals are everywhere, including at ARBCOM

Portal Issues - Editors have requested ARBCOM to take up a case related to conduct issues involving portals. See our coverage of the portal situation for more background on the topic. As of writing, ARBCOM is leaning decline on whether or not to take the case.

Several other case request were made in March, including one that followed the publication of The Signpost's controversial humour article last month (see The Signpost's response in this month's issue), but all were declined as premature.

Desysops

The administrator Bogdangiusca has been temporarily desysopped "as a suspected compromised account".
The administrator Necrothesp has been temporarily desysopped "as a suspected compromised account".

Motions

Eastern Europe / Macedonia (motion): Discretionary sanctions have been extended from "Eastern Europe" to "Eastern Europe or the Balkans".
Manning naming dispute / Interactions at GGTF (motion): The language of the Manning naming dispute remedies has been tweaked to be based on GamerGate, rather than the Sexology case, and apply to any gender-related dispute rather than only transgender issues. In particular, sanctions should be logged at the GamerGate case instead of the Sexology one from now on. Additionally, to consolidate all gender-related things, the Interactions at GGTF case has been amended to feature similar language.
Palestine-Israel articles (motion): The general 1RR provision has been amended to be generally less confusing. Pages must now be specifically be tagged with {{ARBPIA 1RR editnotice}} for the 1RR restrictions to apply.
Conduct of Mister Wiki editors (motion): Salvidrim! is no longer prohibited from reviewing AFC drafts.

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31 March 2019 (all comments)

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“Tides”? —Floquenbeam (talk) 13:51, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Floquenbeam: Tides of March, a pun on Ides of March. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:32, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Just as a note, I think it's worth avoiding statements that give the impression ArbCom's public workflow represents all (or even a majority) of the work we handle. February was far from tame, I believe. It was just that most of our business occurred off-wiki that month. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 00:28, 15 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@BU Rob13: We don't publicize what you don't publicize. Perhaps ARBCOM could provide notes to The Signpost if there are concerns about reportage. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:17, 22 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@BU Rob13: I've been writing this month's Arbcom report - anything I've missed? Its at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/Arbitration report, and so far I've covered a policy amendment, 2 procedure changes, 2 case rejections, 1 new case, 1 other motion, and 1 new bot currently in trial. --DannyS712 (talk) 23:35, 22 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not suggesting you can/should report on things that aren't public. All I'm suggesting is that it's worth avoiding statements that suggest this is all we do, or that ArbCom has been particularly busy/idle (since it's impossible to know that). There have been months where are on-wiki workload has been busy while our overall activity has been less than normal, and there have also been months where our on-wiki workload has been basically nil while our overall activity has been extremely high. (That last case often occurs in January, as many long-term banned editors decide to appeal their bans to a new Committee in hopes they'll get a different result.) ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 23:45, 22 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That seems difficult. ARBCOM won't reveal what it does off-wiki but does not want to appear to be doing little, if anything, based upon what we see on-wiki. We could avoid making statements about "a fairly tame February" but it seems natural to compare this month's activity compared with last month's activity. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:51, 22 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It's more that we can't say what we're doing off-wiki, in almost all cases. If we could, we would be doing it on-wiki. We could perhaps bring back publishing the number of appeals we get in a month, which I think was done once upon a time. Not a bad idea. But often, the most time consuming things we do definitely can't be disclosed on-wiki in any meaningful way unless you want statements like "We talked about something for an entire 150 email thread, but it was private, so we can't tell you what it was." That seems unhelpful. As for your last statement, I suppose you can choose to do what's natural or what's accurate, and it's up to the Signpost which they care about. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 15:53, 24 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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