Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-03-28/Arbitration report
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The volume of work for the Arbitration Committee increased again last week, with five new requests being accepted and only two matters closed. Following considerable discussion about the enforcement of content-related policies, the Committee accepted a potential test case dealing with this area.
A number of recent discussions, especially on the
Another of the newly accepted requests is also in large part a content dispute, although the evidence mixes in more allegations of misbehavior. That would be
Other new (or returning) arbitration cases
Matters involving the same people repeatedly coming into arbitration continued to fill up the process, as half of the currently open cases are at least the second request accepted dealing with that particular user. Two of last week's new cases deal with users who were banned last year and have returned after serving out the term of their ban.
John Gohde, previously known as Mr-Natural-Health and once banned for three months, brought a request against Snowspinner, who has been monitoring Gohde's activity for several weeks, for systematically reverting Gohde's addition of infoboxes to articles dealing with alternative medicine. The arbitrators rejected this request, but agreed to consider Snowspinner's "counterclaim" that Gohde had "returned to the behavior which got him in trouble twice before."
The other new request accepted last week involved
Matters closed with departure of user
In the case brought against
Finding that DiPierro had "engaged in an unhelpful amount of revert warring", along with occasional incivility, the ruling imposed a one-revert limit for a period of three months. Pointing to the fact that "almost all" of these disputes were conducted in the Wikipedia namespace, the arbitrators decided to ban DiPierro from that namespace for a year, with some limited exceptions. As the case was being closed, DiPierro said he would be "taking a break from Wikipedia", apparently for the three months covered by his revert parole.
Mirv criticized the arbitrators for not addressing the behavior of Snowspinner and David Gerard in "picking a fight with an illegitimate revert war over a page in someone else's userspace". In response, Snowspinner contended that he should not be sanctioned for a good faith interpretation of a vague policy in need of clarification, prompting DiPierro to say, "Good faith interpretations of vague policies is exactly what I've been smacked down for".
Meanwhile, the request against
clarified, the ruling applied only to Dr Zen, and other editors are free to make any changes that have consensus support.
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