Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-04-11/Arbitration report

Arbitration report

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

With no new cases accepted in the past week, the Arbitration Committee made some progress in terms of housekeeping to close a few matters, and also issued temporary injunctions in a couple of its current cases.

One of the injunctions came in the case against Irate, which had been accepted last week but not yet formally opened. Complaints about Irate's behavior had been ongoing for several weeks, leading to a request for comment and finally the request for arbitration. According to the statement of the complaint in the request for comment, Irate has a habit of "making vicious and highly insulting personal attacks" against a number of users with little or no provocation.

After the arbitration request was accepted, the situation escalated last Wednesday when Irate began alleging vandalising, through an IP address, categories related to Liverpool. On Thursday, he created his own requests for comment against several users, leading to a block, a flurry of discussion on the mailing list, and renewed activity on the arbitration case. Within minutes, the arbitrators passed a temporary injunction banning Irate from editing Wikipedia outside of his user and user talk pages, along with the arbitration pages related to his case. He was then unblocked in order to present his case.

Also, last Thursday the Arbitration Committee passed a temporary injunction prohibiting Netoholic from reverting pages in the Wikipedia namespace, requiring that he discuss matters on talk pages instead.

Ban from VfD for disrupting deletion process

On Sunday, the Committee issued a decision regarding GRider, who had been accused of disrupting the deletion process in order to make a point. Judging from their comments, the arbitrators seemed to consider this a fairly mild case. They dealt with the matter relatively quickly and limited their ruling to covering only a few points.

The decision noted that GRider had made a number of frivolous nominations to delete articles, and had engaged in revert wars to prevent the results of decisions reached on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion from being implemented. As a sanction, the ruling provided that GRider would be "prohibited from editing any deletion-related page" for a year, subject to being blocked for up to a week for violations.

The remaining cases closed amounted mostly to cleaning up loose ends, as the matters involved had already been largely settled last week. For example, the list of sockpuppets associated with Osmanoglou still had to be compiled before the final ruling involving Tabib and Rovoam (see archived story) was issued.