Last week saw some renewed discussion about the possibility of changing the content that appears on Wikipedia's main page. The developers also implemented a change to the blocking feature and added a new tool for name changes.

A proposal was made last week to add the Picture of the day to the Main Page (currently it appears at the bottom of the Community Portal). Raul654 suggested that it could replace the Did you know template, saying that the template is not well maintained and the articles on it tend to be of poor quality. To encourage feedback on the idea, he created a demonstration of what this might look like.

A few people objected to losing the "Did you know" section, saying that it motivates them to produce new articles, and no decision has been reached yet. Solipsist mentioned that the base of featured pictures is still small, but also pointed to the consideration that "As Wikipedia matures, putting our best material on display is plausibly more important than stimulating new articles." As a compromise, Mindspillage brought up the possibility of rotating between the two features.

Developer Tim Starling added some code to the MediaWiki software to modify the restrictions on blocked users. The change, which allows an account to edit its own talk page even after being blocked, is a temporary workaround while Starling works on a feature for per-article blocking. It was done partly to relieve the pressure on the wikiEN-l mailing list (see archived story), to which blocked users are directed when inquiring about the reasons for their block. However, some concerns were also raised on the administrators' noticeboard about how to deal with potential abuse, and whether it would be necessary to protect talk pages on occasion.

In another programming note, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason has created a tool to allow bureaucrats to take over the function of changing usernames, a task previously handled by the developers. After briefly being disabled due to security issues, the tool was fixed but is only able to perform this operation for accounts with fewer than 5000 edits. Also, a significant difference is that instead of a person having two accounts, and migrating from one to the other, the tool requires that the requested new account not exist yet.

The proponents of a policy proposal dealing with so-called doppelganger accounts are planning to start a vote on the policy today. The vote is scheduled to run through Tuesday, 9 August.

Due to the resignations of several members of the Arbitration Committee, the Wikipedia arbitration process ground nearly to a halt last week. No existing cases were decided, nor did any new cases get opened. Several new requests for arbitration did come in during the week, but were still awaiting some kind of resolution. Instead, concern began to focus on how to replace the resigning arbitrators.

As early as 3 June, Delirium had indicated that he was planning to resign as an arbitrator (see archived story). Since then, Ambi stated on 29 June that she was "resigning effective immediately". In updating the committee roster, former arbitrator Jdforrester noted that Grunt, who had taken an indefinite leave of absence from the committee on 20 June, would also be resigning once a replacement was found. This leaves only six out of twelve arbitrators currently listed as "Active".

Discussion then turned to the question of what would be done about the situation. -Ril- asked whether the next three vote-getters from last December's elections would step up as and serve as replacements (in this case, Fennec, Mirv, and Cecropia, respectively). However, Dbiv said, "I would be totally against just pulling the highest losers into position", and suggested a new election instead.

Arbitrator Raul654 indicated that the committee had been discussing the matter already with Jimbo Wales for several weeks, and that an announcement on the issue would be forthcoming. When this would happen is uncertain, but several people suggested that it should be taken care of as soon as possible. However, avoiding overlap with the Board of Trustees election, which concludes today, may also be a consideration.