Wikipedia:WikiProject Arbitration Enforcement/Standards and principles

This page documents the principles and standards usually employed by administrators participating in Wikipedia:WikiProject Arbitration Enforcement. Because arbitration enforcement relies on the individual discretion of administrators, they remain free to use other standards and procedures. These standards and procedures are not endorsed by the Arbitration Committee and enforcement actions remain in all cases subject to Committee oversight and review.

Principles

Editors wishing to edit in [problematic] areas are advised to edit carefully, to adopt Wikipedia’s communal approaches (including appropriate conduct, dispute resolution, neutral point of view, no original research and verifiability) in their editing, and to amend behaviors that are deemed to be of concern by administrators. An editor unable or unwilling to do so may wish to restrict their editing to other topics, in order to avoid sanctions.

— Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary sanctions

Conduct and content disputes

• Like the arbitration process itself, arbitration enforcement is set up only to address user conduct problems, not disputes about content. Such disputes, e.g. about what content to include or exclude in articles, or which sources should or should not be used, must be resolved through the normal dispute resolution process. Attempts to misuse arbitration enforcement in order to gain an advantage in a content dispute are frowned upon.
• As the above excerpt from the Arbitration Committee's discretionary sanctions provision makes clear, persistent or serious noncompliance with important content policies such as the neutral point of view is misconduct that is sanctionable through arbitration enforcement. However, any allegation of such misconduct should be presented to administrators in a form that does not require them to first resolve any underlying content dispute (which is the job of the community, not of administrators). For this reason, requests for arbitration enforcement in such cases should either contain diffs showing clear and unambiguous violations of the applicable policy or a link to a community discussion that has resulted in a clear consensus that the conduct at issue violates the applicable policy.

Disruption

This WikiProject covers topic areas that are subject to discretionary sanctions or similar broad-ranging remedies imposed by the Arbitration Committee. That Committee has determined that these areas are exceptionally conflict-laden and that editors editing in them must therefore take particular care. This means that the community's tolerance for disruption in these areas is much lower than elsewhere, and so is the threshold for what counts as sanctionable disruption. In particular:

• Disruption is not limited to the usual sort of misconduct (edit-warring, vandalism, sockpuppetry, etc.) but may also include:

• persistent or serious noncompliance with important content policies (as explained above);
• exhibiting a battleground mentality, e.g. by referring to other editors in terms of friends and enemies;
• using incivil terms or making personal attacks, even if similar conduct may be tolerated elsewhere on Wikipedia;
• violating the biography of living persons policy, including in discussions, e.g. by referring to living public figures in a disparaging manner;
• overly long, aggressive or numerous contributions to discussions that have the effect of disrupting an orderly resolution of the matter under discussion;
• systematically discussing Wikipedia editing in the topic area in a non-transparent manner, e.g. through comments that are not in English or off-wiki (on private mailing lists, web forums, etc.) if contrary to the principles established in the Eastern Europe mailing list arbitration case;
• misusing Wikipedia's dispute resolution mechanisms, including arbitration enforcement, e.g. through making too many unfounded requests for administrative intervention.

• Two wrongs do not make a right. Disruption of any sort by one editor does not justify disruption by others. In such cases it is most likely that all disruptive editors will be sanctioned, not just the one who started the disruption.

Standards

In determining whether to impose sanctions on a given user and which sanctions to impose, administrators should use their judgment and balance the need to assume good faith and avoid biting genuinely inexperienced editors, and the desire to allow responsible contributors maximum freedom to edit, with the need to reduce edit-warring and misuse of Wikipedia as a battleground, so as to create an acceptable collaborative editing environment even on our most contentious articles.

— Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary sanctions

Notification and advice

Arbitration Enforcement sanctions are usually imposed after an editor is notified of the relevant arbitration decision. In many cases this notification is given even in cases where the editor can be assumed to be already aware of the arbitration case.

Wherever possible administrators should counsel editors in regard to problematic behavior, and allow editors time to improve their conduct.

Sanctions

While creative or individualized sanctions may at times be necessary, the following sanctions are most often employed:

• revert restrictions for edit warriors,
• interaction bans for people who have trouble interacting collegially with specific other editors,
• topic bans for editors who engage in repeated disruption,
• blocks to stop ongoing disruption or to enforce any of the above sanctions.

Opportunity to explain

Except in situations which involve clear cut violations, or where necessary to prevent disruption, administrators should give editors the opportunity to explain their conduct before imposing sanctions.

Duration and extent

Sanctions should be as narrow and short as is necessary to stop the disruption at issue, and as broad and long as is necessary to ensure that the disruption will most likely not occur again. In practice, this is often realized through an escalating scale of sanctions, e.g. as follows:

• warning,
• block on the order of hours, or revert restriction on the order of weeks, or ban from a few articles on the order of weeks,
• block on the order of days, or revert restriction on the order of months, or wider topic ban on the order of months,
• block on the order of weeks, or general topic ban on the order of months, or indefinitely in egregious cases.

The idea behind escalating sanctions is that if a short and narrow sanction proves ineffective to prevent disruption, a longer and broader sanction may be required. In all cases, sanctions may be reduced in scope or duration, or lifted, at any time if the imposing administrator or the community are convinced that the sanction is no longer required (see the guide to appealing blocks).

Because of the particular sensitivity of the topic areas subject to arbitration enforcement, administrators may tend to err on the safe side and impose longer and broader sanctions than they would for similar disruption in other topic areas.

Appeal of sanctions

The mechanism for the review and appeal of arbitration enforcement sanctions is described at WP:AEBLOCK.