The Signpost invited further commentary and explanation concerning input given by Barkeep49 at the Palestine-Israel articles 5 case. He put forth the hypothesis that we would see the most challenging reports sit open longer than normal (indicating a problem) and/or have abnormal amounts of words (become too unwieldy to close) and/or have an unusual number of admins (not enough admins and/or "too many cooks in the kitchen") and/or have disproportionate participation by parties (which could have been either a response - they were drawn to the hard reports - or a cause - their participation cause reports to become hard). We can also see that PIA cases at AE don't look statistically different from reports in other topic areas. This Arbitration report will show the data that was gathered to support or potentially disprove the hypothesis. – ed.

As part of the ongoing Palestine-Israel articles (PIA) 5 case, I (Barkeep49) conducted an examination of of all 2024 Arbitration Enforcement requests closed between January 1 and December 16. I did so anticipating one or more of the following hypotheses would be true:

• PIA reports at AE would be open longer than normal, or failing that, at least the most difficult PIA reports would be open longer than normal
• The most difficult PIA reports would be longer than normal
• There would be a difference in the number of admins at the most difficult reports

With difficult reports roughly correlating to those which were ultimately referred to ArbCom and caused the opening of the case.

The cases that ultimately caused referrals were not the ones open the longest. They had a higher, but by no means abnormal, number of Admins who commented compared to others. PIA cases were not unusual in the length they were open either, though they were abnormal in representing a huge percentage of overall AE cases for 2024.

Instead, there appears to be far stronger evidence to suggest that AE struggles with handling the conduct of more than 2 editors (the filer and the editor being reported) at the same time.

This is sometimes inevitable when dealing with an issue like WP:TAGTEAMING but when it happens it does seem to make it harder for AE to reach a consensus. This is what unites the cases referred (PeleYoetz/האופה, which were the first referral, and the two Nableezys, which were the second referral) and the other cases in PIA (IntrepidContributor, Makeandtoss and M.Bitton, and Galamore, which were not referred but which were open an unusually long time (they were 3 of the 5 longest cases to resolve at AE in 2024 across all topic areas). In fact, at 2 of those, I think what allowed them to ultimately be resolved was to focus on a smaller set – essentially 1 or 2 specific editors – and then "everyone else involved" as a single entity.

So the data showed that basically all of the hypotheses were incorrect.