Proposed decision of climate change case posted

The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving two open.

This case resulted from the merging of several Arbitration requests on the same topic matter into a single case, and the failure of a related request for comment to make headway. Special rules of conduct were put in place when this arbitration commenced. Since the workshop phase was closed on July 19 (five weeks ago), arbitrators have not formally set any specific target date to post a proposed decision. However, requests for updates from arbitrators have received several responses (see previous Signpost coverage from August 16 and August 9). The case has been technically open: although the evidence and workshop pages have remained closed, no proposals were posted on the proposed decision page and participants were prevented from further discussing their case on the case pages. Up until last week, participants were discussing the case on the proposed decision talk page, but an arbitrator stated that further discussion should not take place on this page until a proposed decision was posted. Instead, general discussion was directed to a general discussion page that was specially created for this case.

Recently, a proposed decision drafted by Newyorkbrad, Risker, and Rlevse was posted for this case. This sparked a significant quantity of unstructured discussion - as of the date of this report, while appreciation or praise was incorporated in a few responses ([1][2][3][4][5]), a large number of concerns were expressed about the proposed decision by many different users, including participants and non-participants (examples: [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]).

This case concerns accusations of incivility, disruptive editing, and tag-teaming to control the content on articles related to race and intelligence. Following a number of delays (see Signpost coverage from June 28, July 5, July 12), the case moved to the proposed decision phase. The decision that was proposed by the drafting arbitrator of the case, Coren, sparked several concerns among participants and non-participants (example). Since then, 9 out of 10 active arbitrators opposed the remedies that Coren proposed and drafted – these included a reminder to all editors about sources, a source probation which required all sources used in race and intelligence articles to be independent, secondary, and reliable sources, and a topic restriction requiring all named parties to make no more than half of their total number of edits to the race and intelligence topic.

Several proposals by other arbitrators are being voted on; a number of these proposals, most of which were drafted by Roger Davies, relate to individual editor conduct and individual editor topic bans, and these have been supported by at least 8 out of 10 arbitrators. A standard discretionary sanctions scheme and a remedy concerning evidence sub-pages have each also received a similar level of support from the Committee. A motion to close has received some support from arbitrators.

• Speed of light: A motion was recently passed to impose a topic ban on Brews ohare from all physics-related pages, topics and discussions. The topic ban is set to expire in August 2011.

As reported in last week's Signpost, the Community has until 23:59 on 25 August 2010 (UTC) to comment on, or make further comments on candidates being actively considered for appointment to CheckUser and Oversight positions. Time is running out as the commenting period is soon going to close. The Committee made a second call for the Community to submit their comments during this commenting period.

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• A brief comment on two points here: (1) the climate change case proposed decision talk page is not a completely unstructured discussion. The page in fact includes an innovation not seen in previous cases, namely a separate section for statements to be made. Though it remains to be seen how successful that will be, several people have taken the opportunity to make statements as well as take part in the threaded discussion. The actual discussion section does lack structure - I had considered replicating the workshop structure to encourage specific comments, but the discussions I started about that didn't get many comments. JohnWBarber did set up a more structured discussion, and I've recently posted to the talk page encouraging the participants to self-organise the page to keep discussion more focused and easier to follow (this would normally be the role of the clerks and arbitrators, but with the volume of discussion seen here, some self-organisation by the participants is needed). (2) The period of comment for the CU and OS appointments has closed now. I'd like to thank all those that commented, either on-wiki or by e-mail. I'll try and post an update on this at the arbitration noticeboard tomorrow, though the schedule is still currently as given in previous notices. Carcharoth (talk) 02:26, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • To add to that, for those who are curious, as of the report date, there were about 2680 words in statements while there was 17,236 words in unstructured discussion. As of this timestamp, the figure for statements has less than doubled to >4000 words while the figure for discussion has more than tripled to >60,000 words. Ncmvocalist (talk) 05:05, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]