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Arbitration report

Two requests for arbitration cases

Two requests for arbitration committee cases were filed at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case in November. One was withdrawn and one has been accepted.

Salted unknown article, oversight block

A new request, "Drmies salting", was initiated by Wumbolo on November 9. The request was about a mainspace article that has never been created and has been salted by an administrator in order to prevent its creation. In place of the actual title, the placeholder "XYZ" was used in the request. The userpage note left for the filing party in conjunction with the salting has been oversighted and The Signpost has no further details on the page's contents.

The case request was closed as "withdrawn" by a clerk on November 10. The same day, Wumbolo was oversight blocked indefinitely. The Signpost has no further details on the reason for the user block.

Important or imprudent? Pondering portals.

A new request, "Conduct in portal space and portal deletion discussions", was initiated by ToThAc on November 18. ToThAc described the issue as follows:

As summarized in Robert McClenon's essay on issues surrounding portals, the necessity of portals in general has been heavily debated over the course of several months. In April 2018, The Transhumanist started an RfC on deprecating portals, which was closed with a rough consensus to not delete all portals.

The complainant said that despite the prior RfC, uncivil discussion of individual portal creations and deletions has ensued, and named 20 other involved parties.

The case was accepted and opened, with arbitrator Joe Roe commenting This has proved to be a long-running and intractable dispute.

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Portal peace

@GoodDay: - I've been wondering how extensive they'll look to resolve the conduct issues. We started with 20 parties, which the accepting arbs seemed to state was way too many, so we'll lose most, but there might be a couple who should be added. I suspect a bevy of TBANs, and potentially the extension of DS to the Portal namespace depending on the makeup of the new Arb corps. Nosebagbear (talk) 18:27, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hopefully, pro-portal editors will come to an agreement on a quota for portals on Wikipedia. An agreed upon quota, would end any mass creations or deletions. GoodDay (talk) 19:45, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm guessing I'm not quite getting what you are suggesting, which surely isn't that we decide how many portals is the right number and allow only that many? Beeblebrox (talk) 00:25, 4 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Should only be x-number of portals on Wikipedia. GoodDay (talk) 00:43, 4 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, so I did understand it. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for anyone to agree that this is a reasonable solution to the problem, but thanks is for replying. Beeblebrox (talk) 01:45, 4 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Blocked user

It's certainly not the norm that a user with almost 17,000 edits gets indefinitely blocked, but a look at Wumbolo's block log indicates that this is not exactly surprising. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:28, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Not just that, but Wumbolo actually announced his retirement over a quarter year before getting indef blocked. ☆ Bri (talk) 01:49, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A good deal of the block log is recent but the indef seems deserved given the legal issues he could've caused for the WMF with his edits. Looks like Wumbolo intended to retire, made almost no edits until that final spree, almost all of which were TBAN violations anyway. If the name ever gets widely reported by reputable sources Wikipedia can allow it, until then edit filters and oversight blocks for anyone who repeatedly trips them or attempts to evade them are appropriate. 47.23.142.18 (talk) 00:56, 7 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

















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