Mahatma Gandhi became a featured article last Saturday, though the process was not entirely smooth sailing (fortunately, at least nobody had to go on a fast in order to get the article featured).

In responding to objections and concerns, ashwatha, who made the nomination, put a considerable amount of effort into dealing with these. As a result, the article underwent significant expansion while its nomination was being considered.

The article also went through several images of Gandhi as editors worked to track down a photograph whose legitimacy for Wikipedia use was unassailable. The initial image had no source information; when it was traced to the French Wikipedia, it was discovered that the source information listed there was for an entirely different image, over which the newer image had been uploaded. A third image was found on the internet that might be suitable, but finally the article ended up with yet a different image, this one borrowed from the Dutch Wikipedia and identified as being in the public domain.

Other new featured articles from the past week include Common Unix Printing System, Aquarium, the cities of San Jose, California and Johannesburg, MTR, Link (Legend of Zelda), and H II region.

Only one picture was given featured status last week:

After a long delay (see archived story), the winners in the second edition of Danny's contest were announced on Sunday. Danny apologized to the contestants for the delay, explaining that his duties in administering the Arbitration Committee election, which coincided with the official cutoff for contest submissions, had put the judging process on hold.

Now that the judges have reconvened, the winners announced were Battle of Alesia, Turquoise, and Page table. Turquoise is already a featured article, and Battle of Alesia is currently a featured article candidate.

Honorable mentions went to Paper plane, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, and Andamanese languages. Grutness also received a special mention for submitting four separate articles related to New Zealand.

Four users were newly minted as administrators last week, Vague Rant, Dbiv, Gabbe, and Jni.

All of the successful candidates were overwhelmingly supported. Vague Rant (nominated by Frazzydee) received 53 support votes and Jni (nominated by fvw) received 25, while each had token opposition from one voter. For both of these users, the one opposing voter was apparently voted that way because of a conflict with one of the support voters, and several users protested against it.

The self-nominations of Dbiv and Gabbe were both unanimously granted adminship, with Dbiv receiving 14 support votes and 1 neutral vote, and Gab receiving 17 support votes.

Nominations for Piotrus and Alteripse are now pending. Piotrus, who has been heavily involved in topics related to the History of Poland was nominated by Páll. Alteripse has been heavily active in medical topics and was nominated by TacoDeposit. They will end Monday, and both look likely to pass. Another nomination, a self-nomination by Curps is also pending. It will end Monday, and also looks likely to pass.

The only unsuccessful nomination was a self-nomination by ABCD whose nomination ends Monday. He received 4 support votes, 8 oppose votes and 3 neutral votes. Many of the oppose and neutral voters felt that he was not involved enough in the community and does not make edit summaries.

Late last week, several more nominations were filed. Omegatron nominated himself on Friday, and has 3 support votes and 0 oppose votes. Dinopup also nominated himself on Friday and his nomination does not look likely to pass, as he has 1 support vote, 1 neutral vote and 5 oppose votes. The main reason behind the opposition is inexperience.

The greatest controversy of the week was over the nomination of Mike Garcia, who is the same person as former banned user Michael. Mike Garcia was unbanned several months ago and placed under the supervision of Danny, and is generally believed to be making good edits, but there was much opposition to his adminship. After some debate, Jimbo Wales intervened to cancel the nomination and end the discussion.

The Arbitration Committee closed four cases last week and accepted no new requests, thus severely slashing its caseload. It also continued to act on cases more quickly than in the past, taking one case from start to finish in eight days.

The Everyking case went quite quickly, as a final decision was reached early on Monday, 24 January, after the case had been accepted on Sunday, 16 January. Since the dispute was already the subject of a lengthy request for comment, as well as two previous arbitration requests that were withdrawn, the expedited handling may be due to the fact that much of the evidence was already organized and the arbitrators already had some familiarity with the case.

After considering several different ways of restricting Everyking from articles related to Ashlee Simpson, where his editing was the focus of the dispute, the arbitrators finally settled on prohibiting him from all reverts except for cases of obvious vandalism. Otherwise, for the next year Everyking is subject to 24-hour blocks for any reverts to these articles.

The arbitrators considered requiring Everyking to reapply for adminship, a possibility that had been suggested by Everyking's critics, but decided not to take this step. Notably, several people pointed out that Everyking had not in fact misused his administrator capabilities, as even his opponents had to concede.

At one point during the case, while Everyking was blocked for violation of the three-revert rule, some controversy ensued when he continued to use the admin rollback function to remove vandalism while he was blocked. However, it was explained that blocks specifically only prevent users from reaching the edit window, and the feature is intentionally limited so as not to restrict other capabilities.

In a case closed last Tuesday, IZAK received a ban and was placed on personal attack parole thereafter. This resolved the last of several cases related (at least partially) to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The case against IZAK was originally brought because he was campaigning against User:Sam Spade's adminship nomination by posting identical messages to a large number of talk pages. Also raised was his general practice of widespread "spamming" on talk pages regarding various issues dealing with Israeli-Palestinian topics.

However, while the arbitrators noted IZAK's crossposting of messages to multiple users in their findings of fact, they imposed no remedies to address it. As arbitrator Ambi had urged in declaring her recusal, they appear to have considered the lack of a clear spam policy with respect to talk page messages.

Instead, the ruling gave IZAK a ten-day ban for making personal attacks, followed by a two-month parole period in which he can be given short bans if he repeats these offenses. A ban from Israeli-Palestinian subjects was considered as a remedy, but rejected.

In a case brought by OneGuy against -lothario-, the arbitrators introduced a new form of sanctions to impose, called "POV parole".

Previously, arbitration cases have resulted in a number of users being placed on a probationary status, where if they violate the terms of probation they may be blocked for short periods of time (usually 24 hours). So far these have dealt with reverting or personal attacks, allowing blocks if the user exceeds a certain number of reverts or makes personal attacks on other editors.

According to the ruling, the POV parole covers situations in which -lothario- "re-inserts any edits which are judged by a majority of those commenting on the relevant talk page in a 24-hour poll to be a violation of the NPOV policy". As the lone dissenter on this remedy, Fred Bauder called it "An abomination, an invitation to bans based on bias and misunderstanding of the NPOV policy". In response, mav pointed out that the parole applied only to reinsertion of material after a determination on the talk page that the material did not conform to NPOV.

Since none of the available evidence indicates that -lothario- has edited Wikipedia, at least while using an account, since the underlying incident took place in November, it appears that an opportunity may not arise in this case to determine how a POV parole would be applied in practice.

Besides the POV parole, the decision gave -lothario- a three-day ban "for repeatedly vandalizing OneGuy's userpage with personal attacks." The arbitrators also admonished OneGuy "not to respond in kind even to severely provocative personal attacks", but did not impose any penalties on him.

The case of ArmchairVexillologistDon, accused of harrassing AndyL was closed without any action because ArmchairVexillologistDon indicated on his talk page that he was "resigning from Wikipedia" on 3 January. (If he should return, the arbitrators indicated that the case could be reopened.)

The only requests for arbitration last week came from Ollieplatt, an alleged sockpuppet of Libertas, and were unanimously rejected. Since Ollieplatt is already involved in the arbitration case regarding Libertas, Fred Bauder commented, "I think your plate is full right now, please resolve your own case first."

In the actual case involving Libertas, Ollieplatt, and a number of other accounts identified as sockpuppets, the Arbitration Committee also issued a temporary injunction last Saturday. The different accounts were all prohibited from editing any pages other than those related to the case (as well as their own user pages and user talk pages). Ollieplatt, the most active of these accounts recently, was later blocked for violation of the injunction, after already receiving several earlier blocks for violation of the three-revert rule.