Ruined temples for posterity to ponder over – arbitration from '22 to '24
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It has been a while! We have gone a very long time without a proper arbitration report. I would like to wish everyone ("including the haters and losers", as the saying goes) a happy holiday season, new year, and all the other stuff.
So:
At one point, the arbitration report was a regular Signpost feature. In 2005, the paper's inaugural year, 49 out of 51 issues carried a report. There were also 12 Signpost articles covering the process of the second-ever ArbCom election. In 2006, there were 59, with regular reports as well as another series following the election process. The next decade or so had a slow decline: 58 in 2007, 51 in 2008, 2009, 2010, 53 in 2011, 37 in 2012, 29 in 2013, and only 6 in 2014, a year featuring infamously high-profile cases like AP1, GGTF, and the first couple months of the GamerGate case. Since then, there was a bit of a rebound for a couple years: there were 17 in 2015 and 15 in 2016. But we went back to just five in 2017 – a year when there was no Signpost at all between February and June.
After that, The Signpost transitioned to monthly publication; there were eleven arbitration reports in 2018, and nine in 2019 and 2020. But we hit a new nadir in 2021, with just three for the whole year; in 2022 there were four, and last year there were six. This year, you are reading the first one.
In all honesty, though, there is more ground to cover than just 2024: the last report (in November) was about a single incident, and the couple of reports before that one were fairly restrained summaries of a contentious case (which had already been the center of a rather long AN/I thread about its previous Signpost coverage). There was a report in January 2023, but that didn't cover any cases either – it just went over the results of the 2022 election. The most-recent arbitration report that I can genuinely call comprehensive was from August 2022.
What's happened since then? Let's pick up where we left off, in August 2022.
We're going to be moving pretty fast. I am going to be skipping over all the tl;dr stuff like unban appeals, admonishments, reminders, clarifications, internal functionary and clerking business, announcements that the Committee has gotten a new coffee maker, and the like: if you want those, read the arbitration noticeboard archive. I will also be skipping things previously covered in The Signpost (like the controversial suspension of arbitrator Beeblebrox last December, or things that have appeared in previous arbitration reports). Here, my hope is to tell you some things that you might not already know by virtue of having a brain and an Internet connection.
Hopefully, some of these may be things that actually have some effect on your daily life as a Wikipedia editor. Indeed, maybe they can even help you keep abreast of changing social norms, so you do not end up like one of those guys who logs in, straps on his tools just like he always used to, does something you're not supposed to do anymore, and gets immediately frappéd at the nearest noticeboard. Maybe this is just wishful thinking.
It should be said, before we start, that the great majority of these things are sad and tragic: being a Wikipedia editor represents a substantial investment of time and effort, and running in the elite circles of administrators and functionaries even more so. The editors who are summarily cashiered and defrocked during these proceedings are rarely bad people – they are just people for whom circumstances have aligned to become incompatible with a hobby of editing Wikipedia. They are often people for whom the hundreds or thousands of hours they've invested in the project have cashed out to ignominy and shame. And there, but for the grace of God, go you and I.
Anyway: