A chat with the elected Arbitrators
6 February 2006
Jimbo Wales appoints 11 arbitrators, increases committee size
23 January 2006
Arbitration Committee elections continue; ArbCom member resigns
16 January 2006
ArbCom candidates (part two)
9 January 2006
ArbCom candidates
2 January 2006
Straw poll closes
19 December 2005
Jimbo starts new poll regarding election
5 December 2005
Last chance to run for ArbCom
28 November 2005
ArbCom voting process
14 November 2005
ArbCom duties and requirements
7 November 2005
A closer look: the calls for reform of the ArbCom
31 October 2005
A look back: the 2004 ArbCom elections
24 October 2005
Current ArbCom members
17 October 2005
Criticism of the ArbCom
10 October 2005
About the Arbitration process
3 October 2005
The history of the Arbitration Committee
26 September 2005
Introduction to a special series: A look at the upcoming Arbitration Committee elections
19 September 2005
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A chat with the elected Arbitrators |
The Arbitration Committee elections concluded this week, with voting ending late Sunday. On Monday, Jimbo Wales announced that he had appointed 11 arbitrators to the committee, increasing the committee size to 15.
In a mailing list post, Wales explained that he appointed the top 8 vote-getters by percentage to the existing open positions, and created three new positions for the three arbitrators running for re-election, all of whom had received over two-thirds support from the community, but failed to reach the top 8.
Joining current arbitrators Raul654, Neutrality, The Epopt and Theresa Knott are the following users:
During the week, only one candidate withdrew (RomaC), and voting proceeded smoothly throughout the week.
Of current arbitrators, only Raul654, Neutrality, Theresa Knott, and The Epopt did not face re-election or did not resign. Of the five arbitrators who ran for re-election (Fred Bauder, Jayjg, James F., Kelly Martin, and Mindspillage), only Kelly Martin was not reappointed to the Committee (Martin withdrew from consideration early in the vote and resigned from the committee shortly thereafter, citing personal reasons.)
Wales' decision to raise the number of seats was not a complete surprise; discussion had been raised on vote-related pages over whether an increased number of arbitrators would help to expedite cases. Of the remaining candidates who were not selected, they may still have a chance of being appointed to the committee in the case of resignation. Wales stated prior to the election that candidates that met the requirements but were "above the number of seats on the ArbCom [may] go into a pool of reserves."
At the end of the elections, 22 candidates finished with greater than 50 percent approval, while 32 finished with more opposition than support. 14 candidates also withdrew before the conclusion of the race. Of the 22 candidates, only two had greater than 90 percent support: Filiocht and current Arbitrator Mindspillage. Four (Charles Matthews, Morven, SimonP, and Dmcdevit) had greater than 80 percent approval (and less than 90 percent), and eight had greater than 70 percent approval (and less than 80 percent). Five of the candidates had 60 to 69 percent approval, and three had between 50 percent and 59 percent support.
Full tallies of the elections can be found at both User:Mathbot/Results and http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/arbcom. All eleven arbitrators have taken office as of Jimbo's post.
Matters related to the selection and conduct of Wikipedia administrators were the subject of considerable attention last week, as community opinion on these questions was solicited in multiple venues.
Radiant! launched an admin accountability poll on Tuesday in an attempt to see whether any particular changes should be made in order to deal with "a number of perennial complaints about adminship or the related procedures."
The poll asked for opinions on a number of different propositions. Radiant! said he had made an effort to include the most frequently expressed views about adminship issues, whether or not he agreed with them personally. A number of additional statements were still added for consideration after the poll started.
Just after the poll began, Linuxbeak also started a discussion intended to focus on possible reforms to the Requests for adminship (RfA) process. Linuxbeak said he hoped this could develop a rough draft of a modified system for handling adminship nominations. Considerable discussion followed, with people listing a number of complaints about the current RfA system. A few possible changes were mentioned, such as de-emphasizing voting in favor of discussion more like featured article candidates, but a concrete reform proposal has yet to emerge.
On Saturday, meanwhile, Radiant! started work on a possible Administrator Code of Conduct that might synthesize some of the ideas from the admin accountability poll. Initial reactions were positive, but indicated some uncertainty as to wording used. A proposal for an Arbitration Committee Code of Conduct discussed last month has gone nowhere, with the fundamental concept drawing mixed opinions, but the actual proposal was widely panned as the work of dissatisfied users who had come under Arbitration Committee sanctions.
In addition, a proposal was also started regarding Requests for comments (RfC). After a large percent of people commented that RfCs were ineffective and not taken seriously, the proposal was made in an effort to give administrators the ability to carry out and enforce small-scale remedies following RfCs. The proposal allows users to make motions to remedy certain undesirable behavior, such as by banning a user from a particular article, which will then be voted on. If the motion receives 2/3 support and has at least five administrators advocating it, other administrators will then have the ability to enforce that remedy.
The admin accountability poll is not designed to achieve any particular policy outcome, simply to gauge public sentiment. Note that most users made individual comments on most issues, thus the results are not as black and white as statistics would suggest. The responses on specific issues, as of press time, are listed below:
| Wheel warring is an inappropriate use of admin powers | 95% Agree | |
| Requests for Comment (WP:RFC) is not taken seriously enough | 93.8% Agree | |
| Admins placing blocks should be contactable via e-mail | 92.5% Agree | |
| The ArbCom should be less hesitant about de-adminning admins who violate Wikipedia rules | 86.8% Agree | |
| Admins should be held more accountable for their actions than they are now | 83.3% Agree | |
| # | Ignoring consensus is inappropriate for an admin | 77.8% Agree |
| @ | There should be suffrage rules for voting on RFA | 73.8% Agree |
| Someone should have the authority to temporarily de-admin problematic admins | 63.6% Agree | |
| RFA should be more of a discussion and less a vote | 62.5% Agree | |
| % | The standards for becoming an admin should be higher than they are now | 51.4% Agree |
| A community-based process should be created to de-admin problematic users | 43.6% Agree | |
| The rollback button should only be used in cases of clear vandalism, or reverting oneself | 43.4% Agree | |
| Bureaucrats should remove (or strike out) votes that are in bad faith or nonsensical | 38.5% Agree | |
| Rather than letting the ArbCom or the community deal with de-adminning, some other panel should deal with that | 26.7% Agree | |
| Bureaucrats should not be on the Arbitration Committee | 22.2% Agree | |
| All admins should be subject to periodic reconfirmation of their admin status | 21.1% Agree | |
| More users should have CheckUser rights | 10.9% Agree | |
| & | There should be an additional layer between "user" and "admin" | 8.2% Agree |
Notes:
# Most dissenters think ignoring consensus is inappropriate in most cases, but cite a few clear exceptions.
@ There are widely varying suggestions for where suffrage should lie.
% The majority of votes are not agree or disagree, so this percentage can be somewhat misleading.
& Several users do suggest the Rollback Tool should be more widely available.
The Arbitration Committee introduced the idea for a clerk's office to help lighten the workload for arbitrators. The proposal calls for a small number of clerks, headed by a former arbitrator, to review evidence and write opinions. Clerks would have write-only access to the arbitration mailing list, to allow them to send comments to the arbitrators. The process is still in planning stages.
Proposals for a new main page design are currently being voted on.
Jimbo has endorsed the creation of Category:Living people to aid in the improved cleanup of vandalism and libel which could be hurtful to living persons. He countermanded early attempts to list the category at Categories for deletion, and encouraged the development of processes (both human-powered and automated) to make the category most useful for its intended purpose. A suggestion to rename the category to Category:* (asterisk) to make it more flexible and less obtrusive to casual readers was made by Kappa; discussion on the possible renaming is ongoing at Categories for deletion.
The Czech Wikipedia has created its own Requests for Arbitration page, and taken its first case, against Vít Zvánovec. Six arbitrators were selected in an election ending on 16 January.
Several news and blog reports touched on a legal case involving a German hacker named Tron. His parents did not want his real name revealed in Wikipedia and filed a legal suit to take down the site. German Wikipedians did temporarily remove a redirect from "wikipedia.de" to "de.wikipedia.org" (the site's true address), but the site was never taken down, and the redirect was restored within a day. The hacker's name remained on the site throughout the day, and although German newspapers obscured his identity, the name now appears in international news reports as well.
A pair of deejays on one of the BBC's national radio stations took to editing their articles while on the air, leading listeners to edit Wikipedia as well. "Wikipedia editing hobby goes nationwide", by frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski, was published in The Register January 19.
Two cautious-to-negative columns were printed this week. "Be very wary of that wacky Wikipedia" was printed in the Toronto Star on January 17, and on January 20 the science site Physorg republished a University of California Berkeleyan article carrying a detailed critique from a professor trying to edit the Daniel Defoe article, in "Surfing is safer -- and smarter -- with flotation devices". On January 21 a site called Press Action reprinted an article named "Wikipedia's Accountability Problem" by Daniel Brandt, which originally appeared on his Wikipedia Watch website.
Two more positive evaluations came from The Japan Times ("Something wiki this way comes" and from Digital Lifestyle Magazine ("Wikipedia, despite expert’s opinion, extremely accurate.") on January 20.
On January 18, The Australian ran a short article about Wikiversity: "Wiki uni gets an online push",
An article in the Sacramento [California] Bee, on Jan 26, panned Wikipedia. http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/education/story/14116860p-14946117c.html
Full article here
The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest. It also deleted a reference to the size of Meehan's campaign account, the largest of any House member at $4.8 million...
More dicussion at User_talk:143.231.249.141 Including a complete list of articles edited.
Administration status was given to eight users this week: Fropuff (nom), Ambush Commander (nom), Yamla (nom), Interiot (nom), NoSeptember (nom), EurekaLott (nom), Haukurth (nom), and Wouterstomp (nom).
A near-record sixteen articles were promoted to featured status this week: Karen Dotrice, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Michigan State University, Panama Canal, Céline Dion, Central processing unit, History of merit badges (Boy Scouts of America), Marian Rejewski, Flag of Mexico, This Charming Man, Yagan, Vivien Leigh, €2 commemorative coins, Amateur Radio Direction Finding, Epaminondas, and OpenBSD.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Butter, Article 153 of the Constitution of Malaysia, Hero of Ukraine, Tooth development, Economy of the Iroquois, History of Test cricket (1884 to 1889), and Planetary habitability.
Featured articles that recently lost their status include Noam Chomsky, Jet engine, Ralph Yarborough, and Mark Latham.
Three lists reached featured list status this week: List of notable brain tumor patients, Flag flying days in Mexico, and List of countries.
Fifteen pictures reached featured picture status this week:
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Two featured pictures lost their status: Image:William Cranch.jpg and Image:Yarra_river_near_city_medium.jpg.
Server-related events, problems, and changes included:
The Arbitration Committee did not close any cases this week, marking the fourth straight week without a closed case.
No cases were accepted this week.
Other cases involving VeryVerily (user page), editors on WebEx and Min Zhu, editors on Rajput, freestylefrappe (user page), and EffK (user page) are in the Evidence phase.
Cases involving Firebug (user page), Robert I (user page), Sortan (user page), Benjamin Gatti (user page), Gibraltarian (user page), Carl Hewitt (user page), Reddi (user page), Deeceevoice (user page), numerous editors on Neuro-linguistic programming, Johnski (user page), a series of editors on Winter Soldier, and Copperchair (user page) are in the Voting phase.
Motions to close are on the table in cases involving AndriyK (user page), Xed (user page), and voters on webcomics AFDs.
