Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-11-18/News and notes
Open letter to WMF about court case breaks one thousand signatures, big arb case declined, U4C begins accepting cases
Arbitration declined in case with much private evidence
The opening statement in a new arbitration case request, titled "Covert canvassing and proxying in the Israel-Arab conflict topic area" read:
There is ongoing coordination of off-wiki editors for the purpose of promoting a pro-Palestinian POV, utilizing a discord group, as well as an EEML-style mailing list (Private Evidence A).
A significant participant in the discord group, as well as the founder of the mailing list (Private Evidence B), is a community banned editor (Private Evidence C), who since being banned has engaged in the harassment and outing of Wikipedia editors (Private Evidence D). This individual has substantial reach (Private Evidence E), and their list appears to have been joined by a substantial number of editors, although I am only confident of the identify of three.
The Discord group was previously public, but has now transitioned to a private form in order to better hide their activities (Private Evidence F). It is not compliant with policy, being used to organize non-ECP editors to make edits within the topic area, some of whom have now become extended-confirmed through these violations. In addition, it is used by the community-banned editor to make edit requests, edit requests that are acted upon (Private Evidence G).
There was much discussion by community members voicing concern of a public posting of wide-reaching allegations. Some of the discussion mitigated or accepted the alleged off-wiki coordination, and some did not. Comments included:
- Editor 1:
another illustration that there are ugly undercurrents about conflicts involving the editing of articles on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
- Editor 2:
goalpost-moving ARBECR [extended confirmed restriction] enforcement creep... expanding ... into literally doxxing editors
- Editor 3:
public aspersions based on secret denunciations
- Arb 1:
Decline this publicity stunt
- Arb 2:
[The filer] shouldn't have just dumped a pile of private evidence in public. But I also don't see how we get out of dealing with the merits of this issue
At our deadline, five out of 10 active arbitrators had voted to decline the public case, which effectively kills the request according to current procedures. However, at approximately the same time as the consensus to decline this case emerged, arbs opened new motions regarding Palestine-Israel articles, "a case to examine the interaction of specific editors in the WP:PIA topic area ... Evidence from the related private matter, as alluded to in the Covert canvassing and proxying in the Israel-Arab conflict topic area case request, will be examined prior to the start of the case, and resolved separately."
– B
Reactions to Foundation legal matter: Open letter and blackout proposal
A petition in the form of an open letter addressed to the Wikimedia Foundation has been created regarding the ongoing lawsuit in India (see also In the media in this issue). Its signatories are profoundly concerned at the suggestion that the Foundation is considering disclosing identifying private information about volunteer editors to the Delhi High Court
.
The most signed petition in Wikimedia history before this was the 2020 Community open letter on renaming, which successfully asked the Wikimedia Foundation to refrain from renaming itself to "Wikipedia". That one reached 1015 signatures after running for months. This petition has crossed 1015 signatures in 10 days, making it the strongest community consensus statement yet.
Separately, a site blackout was proposed, then closed with 2:1 opposition: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/2024 Wikipedia blackout. Some of the voters may have been persuaded by personal comments from Wikipedia's co-founder Jimbo Wales who is privy to board discussions on the case, and said I am personally not worried and think that a protest is unwarranted.
– B, Br, Q
U4C is accepting cases
The U4C is now accepting cases. See the relevant meta page for more information.
CheckUser and COI VRT appointments
Appointments to the Conflict-of-interest volunteer response team (COI VRT) and CheckUser privilege changes were announced by the Arbitration Committee. Spicy was added as a CheckUser. The COI VRT includes, in addition to CheckUsers and Oversighters, the following administrators: 331dot, Bilby, Extraordinary Writ, Robertsky.
Two administrator recalls, one RRfA
Wikipedia:Administrator recall/Graham87 and Wikipedia:Administrator recall/Fastily were closed as successful. Re-request for adminship (RRfA) remains an option for all recalled administrators, with lower thresholds than a regular RfA. As of our deadline, Graham87's RRfA is active. – B
Brief notes
- Reminder to apply for Affcom and Ombuds Comm / Case Review committee. Applications for the Affiliations Committee close on November 18, and applications for the Ombuds commission and the Case Review Committee close on December 2. See meta:Wikimedia Foundation/Legal/Committee appointments for details.
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Voorts and Worm That Turned. Voorts said he
had been planning an RfA before the election dates were announced
, running the first traditional RfA after the October AELECT trial. - Arbitration committee election: Questions may be asked of the candidates at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2024/Questions. Voting will open for eligible community members at 00:00 19 November. Up to nine vacancies will be filled according to the election results.
- Articles for Improvement: The Article for Improvement is Diurnality (beginning 25 November). Please be bold in helping improve this article![1]
Footnotes
- ^ There was no AfI for the week of 17 November and The Signpost has been unable to determine why.
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