New case opens; Monty Hall problem case closes – what does the decision tell us?

The Committee closed one case during the week, and opened one new case. Three cases are currently open.

This case was opened this week after allegations of tendentious POV-pushing and a content dispute involving the usage of sources in the Coanda-1910 article. 21 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence by three users.

During the week, another 66 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence while several proposals were submitted in the workshop by arbitrators and others.

See last week’s Signpost coverage.

This case involves allegations of problematic behavior relating to the Monty Hall problem article. Evidence was submitted on-wiki by 17 editors. Drafters Elen of the Roads and SirFozzie submitted several proposed principles in the workshop before submitting a proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on. The case came to a close during the week after a total of 12 arbitrators voted on the proposed decision.

What is the effect of the decision and what does it tell us?

• Article talk pages should not be used by editors for proposing unpublished solutions, forwarding original ideas, redefining terms, or so forth. Although more general discussion may be permissible in some circumstances, it will not be tolerated when it becomes tendentious, overwhelms the page, impedes productive work, or is otherwise disruptive.
• Users who disrupt the editing of articles by engaging in sustained attacks on other editors may be banned from the affected articles, and in extreme cases, may be banned from the site.
• Articles should be understandable to the widest possible audience. For most articles, this means understandable to a general audience. Every reasonable attempt should be made to ensure that material is presented in the most widely understandable manner possible.
  • If editors disagree on how to express a problem and/or solution in mathematics articles, citations to reliable published sources that are directly related to the topic of the article and directly support the material as presented must be supplied by the editor(s) who wishes to include the material. Novel derivations, applications or conclusions that cannot be supported by sources are likely to constitute original research within the definition used by the English Wikipedia.
• Glkanter (talk · contribs) is indefinitely topic-banned on subjects related to the Monty Hall problem.
  • Glkanter is banned from editing Wikipedia until 25 March 2012.
• Nijdam (talk · contribs) is topic-banned from the subject of the Monty Hall problem until 25 March 2012.
• Rick Block (talk · contribs) is subject to a 1RR restriction until 25 March 2012 when editing the article.
• Gill110951 (talk · contribs) is reminded to follow good practice in respect of conflict of interest, when referencing or inserting his own sources of his own authoring into the article as references, namely to avoid undue weight, use reliable sourcing, and to seek consensus first if editing in a contentious segment of the mainspace.
• Articles related to the Monty Hall problem are subject to "standard" discretionary sanctions.

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28 March 2011 (all comments)

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==Monty Hall problem: Arbitration==

The article summarizes the decision well.

However, the article missed the main news story: the early drafted decision would have made it impossible to write (most) articles on mathematics, because editors would have been barred from providing simple examples that were not directly from reliable sources. The good news is that the arbitration committee listened to the mathematicians' concerns and drafted a decision that both is consistent with the WP rules and allows us to write articles for a general audience.

Another concern: I have long expressed displeasure with the statement about Gill. Gill referenced his own papers when referring to only others' results (and never his own). One ArbCom member opposed the statement about Gill; another formally abstained.

Thanks,  Kiefer.Wolfowitz  (Discussion) 19:00, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For my own part and on behalf of the committee, I'd like to confirm that Dr Gill did not do anything underhand in respect to using his own material, nor was there anything "wrong" with the material itself - these were not self published blogs, but material accepted by recognised journals. The reminder issued by the committee is just that, a reminder that there is an etiquette in sourcing to one's own work, and the poor environment on the article talkpage had definitely not been conducive to etiquette. --Elen of the Roads (talk) 11:09, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That is another accurate and fair statement by a habitually graceful truth-teller. Elen was the principal author of the adopted statement, I should add.  Kiefer.Wolfowitz  (Discussion) 17:36, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It was an interesting case, although I didn't follow the actual cut and thrust, I did review the proposed rulings. The interest came from the fact that ArbCom is generally leery of getting tangled in content issues (quite rightly) they initially allowed themselves to move further into that sphere than normal, despite, or perhaps because of, the esoteric nature of the subject. This is a pattern seen widely, for example the well known philosopher Dr C.E.M. Joad, a member of an early radio panel show The Brains Trust was famous for invariably starting his answer "It all depends on what you mean by ...". On the occasion that the question was "What is the law of averages." Joad replied "The law of averages says that if you spin a coin one hundred times it will come down heads fifty times and tail fifty times." For some reason lured outside his normal cautious approach, by a subject he was less familiar with than many of the questions he did answer so well, he committed what we would today call an epic fail. Rich Farmbrough, 10:58, 30 March 2011 (UTC).[reply]

Suppose there are three editors and one of them is going to be topic banned. I tell you who one of the editors who is not topic banned is.... Um, nevermind. ;-P Jason Quinn (talk) 14:43, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]