Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-11-18/Arbitration report
Ban Appeals Subcommittee goes up in smoke; 21 candidates running
In this week's Arbitration Report: one long-running case is finally put to rest, a Subcommittee is disbanded, and candidate-nominations are closed for the Arbitration Committee Elections, with voting for up to nine new arbitrators to begin 23 November.
E-cigs case
On 17 November, over three months after the case was accepted by the committee, the E-cigs case has been closed. In the committee's findings, despite application of general sanctions to the Electronic cigarettes topic, disruption still continued. Thus, the first remedy in the case is that general sanctions are rescinded, to be replaced with discretionary sanctions going forward. Furthermore, some discretionary sanction extensions were added, with one extension specifying that uninvolved administrators may topic-ban or block (up to indefinitely) single-purpose accounts in the topic area. The other extension encourages uninvolved administrators to monitor articles that are covered under the sanction. A warning for QuackGuru covered topic bans and restrictions from alternative medicine. Also, a warning for CFCF covered participation in multiple edit wars, leading to a 72-hour one-revert Restriction in the topic area.
End of the BASC
The committee made an 8–4 decision to disband the Ban Appeals Subcommittee. Formerly, this subcommittee (BASC) handled appeals via email, from users who had been community-banned (or blocks of long to indefinite duration). However, BASC was only intended for use in certain "last resort" circumstances, for users who had already appealed their block (via {{unblock}} on their talk page), and usually also via the UTRS interface. That was the primary function; BASC was not utilized for appeals of short blocks, topic bans (and other sorts of non-site-wide restrictions), nor ArbCom rulings.
The decision to disband BASC was actually arrived at during a discussion of how to reform BASC, which ended in a split 6-6 decision. The intent of the reform-proposal was to reduce the workload BASC was responsible for (one arbitrator estimated that BASC had received nearly 100 appeals in 2015 so far), by limiting the types of appeals that BASC would consider. Specifically, the reform proposal was for BASC to henceforth only hear appeals from editors who were subjects to an {{OversightBlock}}, a {{Checkuserblock}}, or other bans/blocks involving material "unsuitable for public discussion" (for instance privacy issues, harassment, and legal issues). Other appeals, not specifically needing such discretion, would henceforth be handled via UTRS, AN/I, or {{unblock}} reviews, should the proposed BASC reform succeed. In the end, rather than keep the separate BASC mailing list for handling this more limited set of appeals to BASC, it was decided to have the full ArbCom consider such appeals (along with their existing work hearing appeals to AE blocks and ArbCom remedies), and disband BASC outright. As of 16 November, all pages having to do with BASC have been marked historical, and the mailing list has been shut down.
Finally, self-nominations for this year's Arbitration Committee elections were closed as of 17 November (at 23:59 UTC). There are currently nine open seats, due to the unexpected retirement of one sitting arbitrator. Wikipedia has 21 candidates standing for election at this time; one candidate withdrew during the nominations-phase, then two more withdrew 20 and 21 November. Eligible voters (requires 150+ mainspace edits and must not be blocked at the time) are invited to review the statements of candidacy by the hopefuls, and discuss the election. Several voter-guides by individual Wikipedians have been categorized, and in some cases advertised. Candidates are taking 'official' questions throughout the election-period; voting begins 23 November (at 00:00 UTC), and ends 6 December (at 23:59 UTC). Best of luck to all the candidates running this year. During 2016, those elected will join six sitting arbitrators who are not up for re-election this cycle: Courcelles, DeltaQuad, DGG, Doug Weller, Guerillero, and Salvio giuliano.
- Editor's note: In the interest of disclosure, one of the 21 candidates in the election is a co-editor-in-chief of the Signpost. They are temporarily inactive with regard to their election-related editorial duties at the Signpost and will remain so for at least the remaining duration of the election. As of 16 November, Go Phightins! has taken the reins as sole editor-in-chief.
Discuss this story
Arbcom, rather than waiting for community discussion to happen after the RfC close (the motions to disband/modify BASC were begun literally one day after the community RfC was closed with a requirement for further discussion), apparently decided to just take the opportunity to divest itself of BASC without waiting around for the community to sort out how it would do that work instead. It's entirely possible that eliminating BASC was the right call, but I have to question the haste with which Arbcom did it and the apparent lack of concern they showed for the fact that they were leaving the community, particularly UTRS, in the lurch. The result of this rushed motion, I suspect, is going to be a period in which UTRS and the community scramble madly to figure out some way to handle these cases, and quite likely a period in which the users who are under this type of now-the-community's-problem ban/block will simply slip through the cracks and have no functional route of appeal. We're all volunteers, balls sometimes, get dropped, I get it. But in this case Arbcom seems to have decided it was tired of holding the ball and just chucked it at the community's face. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 00:24, 22 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Let's assume the best-case scenario for a user who would be relying on this previously-BASC-but-now-not workflow, a scenario in which they still have access to their talk page: if this person wanted to appeal their block/ban, this would mean posting a request on their talk page and hoping a sympathetic user is willing to open a discussion on AN. This is an unreliable strategy, because:
{{admin help}}template, but my guess is that a minority would)These aren't insurmountable issues - I don't think it would be too much work for the community to put together a workflow for how UTRS appeals of community bans, etc should be handled - but the fact is that right now they haven't been surmounted, because the community hasn't even had time to realize they're pressing issues, let alone to reach consensus on how to fix them. And until they do get discussed and consensus reached, most people who want to appeal this type of block are going to find themselves out of luck. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 16:10, 22 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]