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The Denial Files 5. 'We fight climate denial on Wikipedia', BBC, 20 November 2021, 19:40

The BBC report Climate change: Conspiracy theories found on foreign-language Wikipedias says that "several foreign-language Wikipedia pages seen by BBC News are promoting conspiracy theories and making misleading claims about climate change". The languages in question include Belarusian, Chinese, Croatian, Kazakh and Swahili.

WMF senior program strategist Alex Stinson is quoted as saying "we need more people involved in this project", and that additional volunteers on those projects would help keep out "conspiracy theories and bad information". Yumiko Sato, a US-based Japanese writer who previously wrote on the issue for Slate, said that "Wikipedia only works if the editing community is large and diverse."

Wikipedia may delete entry on 'mass killings' under Communism due to claims of bias, published in The Telegraph reviews this AfD entry. Mass killings under Communist regimes was nominated for the axe for the fourth time under this name (and had been nominated twice before under the name Communist genocide). All previous nominations were 10–11 years ago. More in-depth reporting on the AfD can be found in this Signpost edition's deletion report.

The Telegraph quotes University of Cambridge historian Professor Robert Tombs, saying

(Deletion) is morally indefensible, at least as bad as Holocaust denial, because 'linking ideology and killing' is the very core of why these things are important.

I have read the Wikipedia page, and it seems to me careful and balanced. Therefore attempts to remove it can only be ideologically motivated – to whitewash Communism.

One editor dismissed the professor's concerns, saying "I fail to see why his view is important on this subject, being a historian in one subject does not automatically make you an authority on all historical subjects".

The story has been reported in multiple other publications, and the AfD received nearly 70,000 page views in the last week. The length of the AfD will soon surpass twice the length of the previous record holder. Currently, !voters are strongly in favor of keeping the article, and a snow close has been proposed.

Disclosure – the author of this section voted Strong keep at the AfD and has previously edited the article extensively. –S

Make no mistake about it: British publisher businessman Richard Desmond indeed used to publish magazines with titles like Asian Babes, and Readers’ Wives, as well as operate a cable channel titled Filth, according to several reliable sources such as the BBC ^(link), The Times ^(link), the Financial Times ^(link), and The Guardian ^(link). The imbroglio originates from Desmond's claim that material must be illegal for it to be classified as "pornography", instead preferring the use of the term "adult material".

Early this month, The Guardian reported that they'd seen a legal document stating that Desmond would take action against Wikipedia.

(He) has now hired lawyers to demand Wikipedia permanently deletes any mentions of the word “pornographer” from his biography.

Lawyers acting for the businessman this week asked Wikipedia administrators to investigate edits to the page, actively monitor it in case the word is reinstated, and keep “genuine, factually correct, edits by Mr Desmond” on the page.
The use of the term ‘pornographer’ when applied to our client is at least factually wrong, gratuitous and insulting, and at most commercially damaging,” they wrote.

It is not clear which "Wikipedia administrators" he asked to monitor the article. Due to a belated request for comment, and the Thanksgiving holiday, the WMF legal department was unable to state whether Desmond or his representatives had contacted them.

While the term "pornographer" was removed three times from the article in the days following The Guardian story, it was quickly restored, and currently remains in the article. None of the editors who removed the word appear to work for Desmond. Several prominent editors have been single-purpose accounts tending to favor Desmond's point of view. Perhaps the most surprisingly prolific editor on the article has been Philip Cross, espousing a point of view in opposition to Desmond's. While there is little or no evidence that he violated policy in his editing of the article, Cross received a short-term block for violating a topic ban on editing articles pertaining to post-1978 British politics.

Le Monde ^{(link, in French)} cited Andreas Kolbe's October Signpost article about a police photo of Floridian Nathaniel White being mistakenly placed in the Wikipedia article on totally unrelated New York serial killer Nathaniel White for more than two years.

Other media outlets who covered the story include Motherboard (Vice) ^(link), who added some of their own original reporting, Slashdot ^(link), Gigazine ^{(link, in Japanese)}, and 10 sites in various European languages. Even Elon Musk managed a throat-clearing tweet on the subject.

Kolbe told The Signpost: "A good thing to have come from this coverage is that after being contacted by Vice, Google finally tidied up their Knowledge Graph panel, removing Mr. White's picture from it. A number of social media posters were also good enough to take the wrong picture down, so things now look slightly better."

Long-time Wikipedia administrator David Gerard, a respected cryptocurrency commentator, has raised doubts on his blog Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain about the propriety of the Creative Commons organization (CC) engaging in what he calls "promotion". He believes that CC is promoting non-fungible tokens (controversial financial instruments used by the cryptocurrency industry to sell certificates of authenticity in electronic works of art). CC denies that they are promoting NFTs, saying instead that they are simply encouraging discussion on their merits.

• Getting away from the algorithm: Outside magazine writes: Why You Should Scrap Your Instagram for Wikipedia (subscription required). Simply put, getting into arguments with strangers here is much more socially healthy than getting into arguments with your friends on social media.
• Wikipedia is a trustworthy source: The Conversation, a magazine written by and aimed at academics, opines: Students are told not to use Wikipedia for research. But it's a trustworthy source. "In the future, we hope first-year university students enter our classrooms already understanding the value of Wikipedia. This will mean a widespread cultural shift has taken place in Australian primary and secondary schools. In a time of climate change and pandemics, everyone needs to be able to separate fact from fiction. Wikipedia can be part of the remedy."
• Most of the time: Daily Trojan, USC's student newspaper, writes: Progress Without Profit: Don’t count Wikipedia out. A college senior discovers that Wikipedia is a good source—most of the time—and is particularly attracted to its non-profit status.
• Crash? Incident? Rampage? Redirect? Fox News writes: Wikipedia users try to change Waukesha 'parade car rampage' entry to 'parade incident'. Fox analyzes the wording used in the name of Wikipedia's article on the 2021 Waukesha Christmas parade attack. The page was fully protected for a time because of "unregistered editors flooding this page with excessive requests for a page rename".

• The Game Console 2.0 When Wikipedia editors or off-wiki publications need photos of video game consoles, they get them from Evan Amos' Vanamo Online Game Museum. The on-wiki collection is available to all, but for those who want to purchase a paper copy, No-Starch Press has published a follow-up and expansion to the 2018 edition. This remains the first and only commercially successful model of a photographer publishing in the Wikimedia platform and also selling that same collection.
• "Major mistakes": Celebrity chef Rachel Allen went to the Irish Mirror to get some longstanding errors in her Wikipedia biography fixed. The items in question, birth date and middle name, were unsourced and added by IPs years ago, in 2007 and 2017. Allen said she had tried to correct the errors on Wikipedia, but had been unsuccessful.
• Wikigifs: Boing Boing writes: Fascinating website shows all the gifs on Wikipedia. Author Annie Rauwerda reports positively on Wikigifs, a "website that shows you each gif on Wikimedia Commons one at a time", and calls it "my new favorite bookmark".

Legoktm is a site reliability engineer for the Wikimedia Foundation. He wrote this in his volunteer capacity.

There is some irony in a piece of software being named MediaWiki while it struggles with media files, but it's not that surprising given that much of Wikipedia's focus and efforts go towards developing text. On the Main Page, you'll most likely have to scroll past multiple sections celebrating written text until you hit the day's featured photo.

Given the recent issues with uploading files, let's take a look into what it actually takes to upload a file to Wikimedia servers.

In the very beginning, you needed to email a Bomis employee to place your photo on the server. The initial version of Magnus Manske's PHP-based wiki would accept any file from editors and administrators. Users had to select a checkbox which said, "I hereby affirm that this file is not copyrighted, or that I own the copyright for this file and donate it to Wikipedia." On the server, the only thing it checked was that the hard drive was not more than 96% full, and if so, it would disable all uploads. And it had a polite request for users, "You can upload as many files you like. Please don't try to crash our server, ha ha."

It was not until 2004 that tagging images with copyright statements became a convention. The Creative Commons licenses and templates were introduced, and Wikimedia Commons was first proposed by Eloquence in March of that same year.

In 2009, the Usability Initiative (see past Signpost coverage) brought grant funding for improving the multimedia experience, leading to UploadWizard on Commons and better metadata extraction, among other things. The English Wikipedia's own File Upload Wizard was developed in 2012, offering users a guided method to upload non-free files.

More recently there has been an increased focus on tools to facilitate mass GLAM contributions, such as bulk uploaders like GWToolset and Pattypan.

Today all media files are stored in an OpenStack Swift cluster, a cloud storage system similar to Amazon S3, so it's unlikely the disks will actually fill up. These files are made available in both of Wikimedia's two primary data centers in Virginia and Texas for redundancy. Users will end up downloading these files from either the data centers, or one of Wikimedia's CDN servers in Amsterdam, San Francisco, and Singapore that is geographically closer to them.

Most users will never see the original file that was uploaded. Instead, a piece of software named Thumbor generates smaller versions of each image, so users viewing an article would only download the size of images they see (also stored in Swift). Videos are scaled in the same way, generating lower-quality versions of high quality uploads (just like on YouTube and other video-sharing sites).

There are three main ways MediaWiki accepts uploads in the backend, each with its pros and cons. First is a direct upload through Special:Upload, which is the original upload interface. This is the simplest form; the entire file is transferred in one go, and available for processing on the server immediately. However, because it is so direct, there's no opportunity for any nice user-facing progress bars, and any failure means the entire upload must be retried. It also only accepts files up to 100MB.

Then there's chunked uploading, in which a file is split into much smaller pieces, uploaded chunk-by-chunk, and then finally reassembled into one file (via the job queue) and processed. Tools like UploadWizard and bigChunkedUpload are able to provide progress bars for users, and individual chunks can be retried if there's a brief network interruption. It is more complex to implement, but more reliable and flexible, so most upload tools and bots use it. In theory, users can use chunked uploads to upload files up to the maximum file size of 4GB, but there may be some practical issues like server-side timeouts.

Finally, some editors and administrators can upload files by specifying its URL. MediaWiki will download the file from the remote website, and then process it as if the user uploaded it. This is convenient for users, as they don't need to download the file individually before re-uploading it. However, this comes with limitations, as the server needs to be able to download and finish the entire upload in 180 seconds, and downloading from some sources (especially the Internet Archive) might be too slow for that.

Once the file is actually on the server, MediaWiki does some security checks on each file. It's easy to hide arbitrary files (think malware or copyrighted stuff) inside JPEG images, which we want to reject. This was exploited by some users on Wikipedia Zero networks to share pirated films without having it count against their data plans. SVG files can be written in a way that allows triggering cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks—MediaWiki rejects those too. There are also some validity checks, like making sure a file named "Foo.png" is actually a PNG file.

At this point, MediaWiki will extract some metadata from the file, like its size, geolocation, and other exif fields. This data is stored separately from the file itself for quicker retrieval. PDF and DjVu files that contain text will have that extracted and indexed for search.

Finally, the original file is uploaded to Swift in both of the primary data centers (Virginia and Texas). Even though this step takes place between Wikimedia servers, it is encrypted using HTTPS in case an attacker is able to tap into cross-data center communications. MediaWiki will also instruct Thumbor to pre-generate thumbnails for common sizes, so users see no delay when trying to use them in an article. If a new version of an existing file was uploaded, MediaWiki would also rename the previous version in Swift, and delete all the old thumbnails.

Once a file has been uploaded, there's no way to modify it in MediaWiki itself. Performing basic functions like rotating or cropping needs to be done by external tools like CropTool.

The process for uploading files has grown more and more complex as requirements and scale have increased. The current system is rather optimized for delivering users small images quickly, and less so for handling the upload and processing of very large files. For an encyclopedia that is still mostly focused on text and images, that may be fine. But as people ask for and expect more interactive and engaging elements, that may need to change.

There has been no dedicated Wikimedia Foundation development team focusing on backend media development in the past few years (it's debatable whether it ever had one), with critical components like Thumbor being entirely unmaintained at Wikimedia and outdated. For now, many of the gaps are being filled with various tools and gadgets by those who are interested.

And if you desire some nostalgia, you can still send an email file a Phabricator task and sysadmins will upload the files for you.

There were only a few hundred women pilots in World War II. Yet Wikipedia recently mixed up the images of two women pilots from that period. The image of Veronica Volkersz (née Innes) was featured prominently on the English Wikipedia main page on 19 November 2021, to illustrate the DYK ("Did you know?") item about Dutch pilot Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten.

This was the complete text of the DYK hook: "Did you know … that about 700 airmen – and Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten (pictured) – received the Dutch Airman's Cross?" Pictured was a woman pilot. So far, so good. It was a pity though that the woman in the photo was not Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten, but Veronica Volkersz.

Love was to blame, of course. The photo was taken from the Dutch National Archives, which had a rather complicated text accompanying the photo, speaking more about Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten than about the actual pilot in the photo, Veronica Volkersz. Veronica, born Veronica May Innes in Chesterton, April 17, 1917, was a former beauty queen who joined the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) as a Second Officer in March 1941. We know this because of the book that Veronica Volkersz wrote about that period (The Sky and I, 1956) and because of her RAF logbooks 1939–1965 (currently for sale online at £9,000).^[1]

Veronica married Dutch pilot Gerard Volkersz in Chelsea in 1942, and thus acquired Dutch nationality – hence the mix-up in the Dutch archives. ATA pilots like Veronica were tasked with ferrying aircraft between airfields, but she did far more. Her first solo flight in a Spitfire was in 1941, and she flew in a few dozen types of aircrafts. She was in fact the first woman ever to pilot a Gloster Meteor EE386, a jet fighter. Volkersz flew until 1965. She died in Cambridge, Dec. 13, 2000. According to AbeBooks: "The entry on her Death Certificate describes her occupation thus: 'Aviator (retired)'." Indeed, this woman needs a Wiki article a.s.a.p.

Back to Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten – who rightly received the Dutch Airman's Cross in 1947, and still is the only woman to have received this distinction. Pictures of her are quite rare, but I recently found some images to illustrate her Wikipedia article, helped by a family member and the Dutch National Archives. About 400,000 photographs from this archive, Nationaal Archief, were transferred to Wikimedia Commons in the last decade.^[2]

All metadata contain mistakes. That's only natural, and Wikipedia editors were not the first to be tripped up here. They were in good company: the Dutch Ministry of Defence used the same wrong photo of Ida in its magazine De Vliegende Hollander (Flying Dutchman) in 2015.^[3]

Wikipedia can learn from the mistake made with this photo in DYK. Never take information for granted, not even metadata from National Archives. In this case the (admittedly unclear) source, in which two names were mentioned, should have been a clear warning sign. Moreover: the original of the cropped photo of Veronica Volkersz was already in Commons – with correct attribution.

With the Arbitration Committee elections for 2021 currently underway, it seems unfitting that the Signpost hasn't had a full arbitration report all year. A lot has happened in the last year: twelve motions were made, twenty-two cases were declined, one was dismissed, one was suspended, and six were closed. Three admins were desysopped, and one seemingly-nascent RfA candidate was indefinitely blocked as a sockpuppet of a Foundation-banned user. Additionally, the most active area of discretionary sanctions (American politics 2) had its scope redefined significantly. All in all, a total of 809 arbitration enforcement actions were logged, including in relatively new enforcement areas like COVID-19.

Without further ado, let's go over it!

Eleven candidates stood for the December 2020 Arbitration Committee Elections (with twelve nominations, of whom one withdrew prior to the start of voting). Among them were two non-administrators, two current arbitration clerks, and two sitting arbitrators from the December 2019 term.

In order of nomination, the candidates were:

• Bradv, a sitting Committee member who was also a drafting arbitrator for Medicine, as well as Portals in January and Motorsports in March
• Primefac, an admin and bureaucrat editing since 2012
• Scottywong, an engineering manager who had been an editor since 2007 and an administrator since 2012
• Maxim, another sitting member on the last Committee, who was a drafting arbitrator on RHaworth in January and Medicine in April
• BDD, a librarian who had been an administrator since 2013
• Barkeep49, an administrator since 2019 whose statement included a full platform

• TonyBallioni, administrator and CU/OS since 2018 (who withdrew prior to the start of the election)

• L235, an active editor since 2014 and an arbitration clerk since 2015
• Hawkeye7, former administrator and MILHIST coordinator
• CaptainEek, an OTRS agent and administrator since May 2020
• Guerillero, arbitration clerk and administrator
• SMcCandlish, technical editor and non-administrator

The seven candidates elected included five new arbitrators (Barkeep49, BDD, CaptainEek, L235, and Primefac), as well as the reelection of both sitting arbitrators (Bradv and Maxim).

In January, Tranche Beta arbitrator Xeno resigned, saying:

I have very recently accepted an upcoming role with the Foundation to help facilitate the second phase of the meta:Universal Code of Conduct consultations investigating key enforcement questions. To protect the integrity of internal committee deliberations, I am humbly tendering my resignation from the Arbitration Committee.

Since then, the Arbitration Committee has consisted of fourteen members (the above-mentioned Tranche Alpha, in addition to Casliber, Beeblebrox, David Fuchs, KrakatoaKatie, Newyorkbrad, SoWhy, and Worm That Turned).

In February, a formal structure for case workflow (initiated by Beeblebrox) was passed 8–0 with one abstention. The motion formally instituted a workflow structure for the Committee's internal handling of accepted cases (including an evidence phase, workshop phase, and proposed decision phase). The drafting arbitrator can add, remove, or extend phases according to their discretion; they can also choose to take actions like enforce threaded discussions or institute word limits on parties to a case. These parties can petition for changes to the rules in their case.

In March, a community consultation was opened regarding the practice of discretionary sanctions. This discussion concluded in May, reaching "a consensus that Discretionary Sanctions serves a purpose and remains effective in creating conditions for high quality information to be presented to our readers". Also in March, a majority of the Arbitration Committee signed an Open Letter from Arbcoms to the Board of Trustees, drafted over several months by many Committees across a variety of Wikimedia projects. The letter was included in the previous (March 2021) Signpost arbitration report, as well as a more detailed explanation of its intent and purpose.

In April, two actions were taken in the interest of increasing transparency. First, an appeals report page was created, at which arbitrators now publish periodic reports on private ban/block appeals. Later, a motion was passed regarding the Committee's retention policy on personally identifying information: an annual "examination" of the ArbCom wiki (to take place every April) was established, in which information would be "considered no longer necessary if the user has not edited under any account for a significant number of years or if the reason for the private information to be held has passed".

In September, a motion passed to amend certain Arbitration Committee "500/30" remedies, which required that editors have 500 edits and 30 days on their account prior to editing in certain areas. The amendment changed the language of the remedies to instead say "extended confirmed restrictions" were in place (which, at the time of the motion, was identical to 500/30).

New trainee clerks appointed the year 2021 include CodeLyoko, Firefly, MJL, and GeneralNotability (the latter of whom was promoted to full clerk in October).

• AP2 cutoff moved to 1992

  January 19: Following a request for clarification and amendment filed by Interstellarity on December 23, an 8-to-1 majority (with two abstentions) passed a motion amending the AP2 cutoff from 1932 to 1992. All other provisions of the remedy remain in place. The previous sanctions had been instituted when the American politics 2 case (often referred to by the shorthand of "AP2") concluded, with one of its remedies being a modification of previously existing discretionary sanctions on American politics (AP1, or ARBAP). The AP2 remedy authorized standard discretionary sanctions on "all edits about, and all pages related to post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people".

• Flyer22 and WanderingWanda case dismissed

  January 21: The Arbitration Committee dismissed the pending case between Flyer22 Frozen and WanderingWanda, saying: "The Committee has received word that Flyer22 Frozen has passed away [...] We would like to express our heartfelt condolences to the family of Flyer22."

• Encyclopedia Dramatica links permitted with consensus

  February 12: Following a request for amendment filed by Steve M regarding a dispute over link inclusion on the Encyclopædia Dramatica article, Remedy 1 of the MONGO case was amended by motion. The original remedy, from 2006, said that links to Encyclopædia Dramatica may be removed "wherever found on Wikipedia as may material imported from it". The amended version now says that such links "may be removed wherever found on Wikipedia, absent explicit consensus for their inclusion".

• Gender and sexuality remedies moved to single case

  February 22: an 11–0 motion (initiated by Barkeep49, with language drafted by L235 and Maxim) passed to move Remedy 1.1 of the 2015 GamerGate arbitration ruling to a new case specifically created for it, Gender and sexuality (or "WP:ARBGSDS" -- quite a mouthful). Furthermore, remedies originally from the Manning naming dispute case, as well as the Gender Gap Task Force case, were relocated to the new WP:ARBGSDS case. There were no new sanctions or remedies issued by the motion, which was done solely for the purpose of making enforcement simpler by unifying remedies from disparate cases with similar areas of relevance.

• Topic bans and site bans on Kurds and Kurdistan

  February 23: The Committee ruled on a wide-ranging arbitration case concerning the Kurds, Kurdistan, and Syrian Kurdistan (with drafting arbitrators BDD, Primefac and Maxim). Prior attempts at resolution were given as one thread on DRN, one on RSN, one on NPOVN, and eight on AN/I. The case was closed with a number of findings; primarily that the conduct of several participants had gone beyond the pale (in some cases as the culmination of a long history of disruptive editing). One editor, Paradise Chronicle, was warned to avoid "uncollegial conduct" in the future. Another (GPinkerton) was site-banned. Three editors (Thepharoah17, عمرو بن كلثوم, and Supreme Deliciousness) were topic-banned from "articles related to Kurds and Kurdistan, broadly construed". Three days later, these topic bans were amended by a 10–0 motion to strike "articles related to" (i.e. to make them apply across the entirety of the project).

• Tenebrae motion

  March 23: Due to issues regarding conflict of interest, Tenebrae was "indefinitely banned from any mainspace edits related to Frank Lovece or Maitland McDonagh, broadly construed", but permitted to continue requesting edits on talk pages. Following an AN discussion two days later, Tenebrae was community-banned, and their account indefinitely blocked.

• RexxS desysopped

  March 26: A case centering around RexxS was closed, after a month-long case filed by ProcrastinatingReader that accumulated 43 preliminary statements. Of those statements, around 17 had requested that the Committee decline the case. RexxS, a board member of Wikimedia UK until his term expired in July 2021, and an administrator since April 2019, was desysopped. RexxS, a contributor with over 43K edits since January 2008, has not edited Wikipedia since February 25, one day before the case was filed; on the 23rd he had commented that while he was open to "discuss and try to learn any lessons", he was unwilling to participate in "a forum for everybody who has ever disagreed with me to sling mud".

• Carlossuarez46 desysopped

  March 31: An arbitration case against administrator Carlossuarez46 was filed. The dispute regarded "geostubs", articles generated from public databases of geographical information. Many geostubs serve as the basis for long and beautifully sourced articles — we all owe thanks to the famous Rambot — but many others remain stubs for years or decades, and many derive their claim to notability from the mere existence of coordinates in a database. Indeed, many geostubs are nominated for deletion upon the discovery that the database entries are the result of technical glitches, or data entry errors. Carlossuarez46, who had created thousands of geostubs in decades past, was accused of violating administrator conduct standards in 2021 discussions about his geostubs. After a week of proceedings, he announced his retirement on his userpage, and the case was suspended for three months on April 8, with a temporary three-month remedy of desysopping until it was resumed. On July 8, it was automatically closed, with him remaining desysopped.

• Antisemitism in Poland remedy amended

  May 9: Following a request for amendment by Girth Summit on March 12, the Committee passed a motion amending Remedy 5 of the Antisemitism in Poland case.

• COVID-19 sanctions moved from GS to DS: In the interest of full disclosure, note that yours truly made a statement on this one

  June 16: Following a long case request spurred by vigorous months-long dispute over the COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis, a motion was passed 8–1 to rescind the March 2020 AN-instituted community sanctions on COVID-19 (WP:GS/COVID19) and replace them with discretionary sanctions (WP:ARBCOVIDDS). Previously, 15 individual sanctions and 36 page sanctions had been logged under the GS regime; since the switch in June, the arbitration log has had 7 individual sanctions and 37 page sanctions for COVID-19.

• Mutual interaction ban loosened

  July 3: the interaction ban between Ritchie333 and Praxidicae was amended by motion to allow discussion of the ban itself: "Parties may discuss the existence of the ban, and examine its implications, but remain forbidden from discussing each other and interacting with each other."

• Palestine-Israel restrictions clarified

  July 12: Following a request for clarification and amendment by ProcrastinatingReader, the Committee passed a motion that "The phrase 'other internal project discussions', as used in Remedy 5 of the Palestine-Israel articles 4 case ('ARBPIA General Sanctions'), shall be construed to include requested moves."

• Iranian politics DS enacted, four topic bans, two warnings

  September 20: The Iranian politics case, filed in July by Idealigic, concerned an area of dispute already under community-instituted general sanctions — namely, the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK). Previous attempts at dispute resolution had failed, and the Arbitration Committee issued four topic bans: BarcrMac, Idealigic, and Stefka Bulgaria were topic-banned from "post-1978 Iranian politics, broadly construed", while Mhhossein was topic-banned from "People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), broadly construed". Furthermore, Mhhossein and Vice regent were warned against "a battleground mentality". Additional remedies included the upgrade of post-1978 Iranian politics from general sanctions to discretionary sanctions, and the authorization of uninvolved administrators to facilitate RfC consensus-building by instituting word/diff limits on RfC participants, bans on disruptive RfC editors, sectioned commenting rules, and moratoriums (of up to one year) on additional RfCs on any given dispute.

• Eostrix blocked

  October 19: As has been previously covered in the Signpost, prospective admin candidate Eostrix was blocked by the Arbitration Committee five days into a nearly unopposed home-run RfA. Eostrix was blocked indefinitely as a sockpuppet of Foundation global-banned user Icewhiz.

• Emergency desysop of compromised admin account Epbr123

  November 19: Administrator Epbr123 has made over 290,000 edits since 2006, but has been largely inactive in recent years (their last 50 edits go back to 2013). The account was desysopped, globally locked, and indefinitely blocked under Level I desysopping procedures after its login credentials were compromised and used to make a highly offensive (now revdelled) edit to the article on George Floyd.

• January 27: Donald1972, indefinitely blocked in August 2019, made a successful appeal to the Arbitration Committee, and was unblocked on the condition that they be forbidden from editing the article Matthias Laurenz Gräff.
• March 4: SethRuebens, previously indefinitely blocked in August 2020, was unblocked following a successful appeal to the Committee. This editor would again be indefinitely blocked following an AN/I discussion in July.
• March 17: J-Man11, indefinitely blocked since September 2020.
• March 24: Jessiemay1984, indefinitely blocked since January 2021.
• June 14: Uhooep, indefinitely blocked since May 2021.

So far, a total of 809 enforcement actions have been logged in 2021. These include a few in rarely-seen areas like Falun Gong, Scientology and Macedonia; the bulk of enforcement, however, occurred in traditionally contentious areas like Israel-Palestine and American politics 2. The most active category, however, was Biographies of Living Persons, at 143 logged actions.

Corrections: After publication, it was noted that RexxS's last edit was on February 25, not February 26, and that of the statements in his case, around 17 had been requests to decline. His final comment on the issue, from February 23, was also provided.