Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-04-04/Arbitration report

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The Report On Lengthy Litigation

By Michael Snow, 5 April 2005

In cases involving two editors coming before the Arbitration Committee for a second time, the Committee moderated its ruling in one situation while increasing restrictions in the other matter. Meanwhile, the arbitrators confirmed the existing practice of blocking so-called public accounts in the Iasson case.

Revisiting subject-matter restrictions in two cases

The arbitrators closed out several cases on Monday, including the second case each dealing with RK and Everyking. RK successfully appealed the terms of his original case to lift a subject-matter ban, while Everyking received a similar ban after previous restrictions were deemed insufficient.

The request for arbitration against Everyking was submitted by Snowspinner after continued debates on Ashlee Simpson-related articles led to Everyking being blocked and unblocked several times. The complaint focused on alleged violations of a previous ruling, which prohibited Everyking from reverting these articles. Snowspinner and others claimed that Everyking was using "partial reverts" to restore disputed text piecemeal in hopes of avoiding the prohibition on reverts from the original case. Everyking argued that the edits people were calling reverts were not in fact reverts, but attempts at compromise, and that the evidence was being misinterpreted.

The arbitrators determined that Everyking had in fact continued to revert articles related to Ashlee Simpson, in spite of the prior ruling, and decided instead to prohibit him from editing those articles entirely. The restriction was defined as applying to "Any article which contains a link to Ashlee Simpson or mentioning Ashlee Simpson...with respect to that portion of [the] article which is concerned with Ashlee Simpson." Noted in the ruling was the fact that Everyking had conducted himself well on issues not related to Ashlee Simpson.

RK's case involved reconsideration of the previous ruling after RK had completed a four-month ban. Observing that RK had "demonstrated some improvement in editing habits", though not enough to be called a "model editor", the arbitrators decided to lift RK's ban on editing articles related to Judaism. Instead, they replaced it with a limitation of one revert per 24 hours on those articles, along with a general personal attack parole. As with the original ban, these restrictions were to last for a one-year period.

Public accounts and disruption

The Iasson case traces back to December, when Iasson arrived and began making "unilateral changes to deletion policy" against consensus. He followed this up by making peculiar votes and comments regarding articles nominated for deletion and trying to conduct polls about them. As Taxman described Iasson's modus operandi, "The votes are generally nonsensical, and clearly not designed to be helpful".

A request for comment about this ongoing behavior in January brought considerable agreement that Iasson was being disruptive. Around this period, a new account by the name of Faethon appeared in the discussion. Several people familiar with the situation identified Faethon as having the same style as Iasson.

As Faethon, he created a number of accounts for which the password was effectively disclosed, because it was usually the same as the name of the account. Following standard practice for public accounts (where the password has been compromised), most of these accounts were either blocked or had their passwords changed. It was also reported that some additional accounts had been listed by bugmenot.com, which posts account passwords for a number of sites that require registration, but these were removed upon request.

Finding that his conduct on Votes for deletion and with respect to deletion policy was disruptive, the arbitrators banned Iasson for a year. The arbitrators noted that Iasson had made only seven edits to articles, instead making nearly all of his edits on deletion issues. The decision also provided that any public accounts could be blocked routinely upon discovery.

Other cases

Also set to close was a case involving several edit wars between a number of contributors, including quite a few sockpuppets. The abusive sockpuppets were simply banned, and most of the ruling focused on two other parties, Tabib and Rovoam. Based on the revert wars and interspersed personal attacks, they applied a one-revert parole and a personal attack parole to Rovoam for a year. Tabib escaped without any sanctions, as arbitrator David Gerard said, "Tabib was being sorely provoked".

Two new requests were accepted last week. The first involved a dispute between Tkorrovi and Paul Beardsell over the Artificial consciousness article, including allegations of personal attacks. On Sunday, Violetriga made a complaint against Irate for abusiveness and vandalism of user pages, which the arbitrators also agreed to consider.